Yazoo County Blues, a Well-Kept Secret

Yazoo County Blues, a Well-Kept Secret (1 of 3)

By The Rev. Ken Cook Special to The Yazoo Herald - December 1999

[In December 1999, The Yazoo herald ran a series of three articles on the blues of Yazoo County, written by Ken Cook, the son of Ida Johnston Cook and the grandson of Luther D. and Sallie Johnston in the Scotland community. He and his wife, Margie, and their children, Abbi and Phil, live in Abington, PA. An Episcopal priest, he is associate rector of St. John's Episcopal Church in Huntingdon Valley, PA (a northern suburb of Philadelphia). His relatives in Yazoo City include his aunt, Margaret Johnston and his cousins, John and Sally (Johnston) Davis, Garry and Elaine (Johnston) Roark and Robbie and Margaret (Davis) Yerger. Other Mississippi relatives live throughout the Jackson area and in Tupelo and Ocean Springs. Most of his best, early memories focus on being with his mother's large family in Yazoo County at Christmas or for ten days each summer. His interest in blues music began when he first heard Howlin' Wolf sing "Highway 49." Studying the blues functioned both as a hobby and as a way of keeping in touch with his own Southern roots.] 

During the summer of 1998 Vanguard Records released a new compact disc (CD) entitled Blues from the Delta.  Composed of 20 songs written and performed by the legendary Skip James as early as 1931 - but most of the songs date from the mid to late 1960s. This collection has been painstakingly remastered in the studio and includes two previously unreleased songs.

The artwork and notes on the back of the packaging proclaim Skip James as the "Founder of the Bentonia school of Delta blues."

Other CDs featuring the work of this Yazoo County bluesman include Skip James - Greatest of the Delta Blues Singers, the Yazoo Records' The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James and 50 Years - Mississippi Blues in Bentonia.

Nehemiah Curtis James was born on June 9, 1902 in Yazoo County. Was he born in Bentonia or Yazoo City?

His biographer, Stephen Calt, working from hours of taped interviews with Skip, is certain that James was born at the African American Hospital in Yazoo City and raised on the Whitehead plantation near Bentonia.

Around 1917 James began to learn the guitar from a popular local entertainer, Henry Stuckey of Satartia. Later he began to study the violin and piano as well.

Working as a laborer and musician, Skip got his break by means of a 1931 audition with H. C. Speir, a talent scout for Paramount, at his Jackson music store. This resulted in a trip to Grafton, Wisconsin.

The Depression largely destroyed the recording industry, and James wandered throughout the South during much of his life.

Sick--it would turn out to be cancer--he was “rediscovered” by young blues enthusiasts at a hospital at Tunica in 1964.

Within a few weeks, he was performing again, this time at the Newport (RI) Folk Festival.

Two years later the English "super group" (with Eric Clapton), recorded a loose rock version of Skip's I'm So Glad, drawing international attention to this Mississippi native.

He toured widely throughout the United States (and Europe in 1967), while recording ten albums. He died in 1969 and is buried in Merlon Memorial Park, suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, his gravestone being donated by admirers, including Clapton.

Skip James' music provides a classic example of what blues is all about, even though it is somewhat atypical. Singing in a near-falsetto, he usually sounds all alone as he laments the woes of his youth (Hard Luck Child) or his broken marriage (Devil Got My Woman).

But a wry sense of humor seems to lurk behind many of the songs (if You Haven't Any Hay, Get on Down the Road).

Perhaps due to the influence of his father, a late-in-life pastor, he performs first-rate gospel tunes: Jesus Is a Mighty Good Leader. His complicated guitar solos sound eerily like 1940s field recordings from West Africa, while his stop-and-go piano work seems downright Celtic.

His Little Cow and Calf Is Gonna Die Blues (1931) would spawn themes which his peers would explore within a faithful but expanding tradition: Milkcow Blues (Kokomo Arnold, 1934), Milkcow's Calf Blues (Robert Johnson, 1937), and Milkcow Blues Boogie (Elvis Presley, 1954).

Yazoo County is home to at least nine other recorded blues musicians. In the next two parts of this series, we will briefly consider them.

For further reading, consider Robert Palmer's Deep Blues, Paul Trynka's Portrait of the Blues (which includes photos from Yazoo County) and Stephen Calt's I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues. 

The Yazoo County Blues--A Three-Part Series Blues enthusiasts come to Yazoo County, especially to the town of Bentonia, in search of the Yazoo County Blues and the artists, like Skip James, who helped make the Blues what they are today. This three-part series will run consecutive Wednesdays in December. Don't miss them! 

Part 2: the Blue Front Cafe, a Blues icon.

"The Slaves of Capitalism": 

Convicts and Felons after the Civil War

Until 1928, companies leased' Alabama convicts — mostly black and poor sending them to coal mines for cheap, unorganized labor

By Douglas A. Blackmon for The Wall Street Journal - 2001

BIRMINGHAM

On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the Shelby County, Ala., sheriff and charged with vagrancy. After three days in the county jail, the 22-year-old African-American was sentenced to an unspecified term of hard labor. The next day, he was handed over to a unit of U.S. Steel Corp. and put to work with hundreds of other convicts in the notorious Pratt Mines complex on the outskirts of Birmingham. Four months later, he was still at the coal mines when tuberculosis killed him. Born two decades after the end of slavery in America, Green Cottenham died a slave in all but name. The facts are dutifully entered in the handwritten registry of prisoners in Shelby County and in other state and local government records. In the early decades of the 20th century, tens of thousands of convicts — most of them, like Mr. Cottenham, indigent black men — were snared in a largely forgotten justice system rooted in racism and nurtured by economic expedience.

Until nearly 1930, decades after most other Southern states had abolished similar programs, Alabama was providing convicts to businesses hungry for hands to work in farm fields, lumber camps, railroad construction gangs and, especially in later years, mines. For state and local officials, the incentive was money; many years, convict leasing was one of Alabama's largest sources of funding.

Assault with a stick

Most of the convicts were charged with minor offenses or violations of "Black Code" statutes passed to reassert white control in the aftermath of the Civil War. Mr. Cottenham was one of more than 40 Shelby County men shipped to the Pratt Mines in the winter of 1908, nearly half of them serving time for jumping a freight train, according to the Shelby County jail log. George Roberson was sent on a conviction for "assault with a stick," the log says. Lou William was in for adultery. John Jones for gambling. Subjected to squalid living conditions, poor medical treatment, scant food and frequent floggings, thousands died. Entries on a typical page from a 1918 state report on causes of death among leased convicts include: "Killed by Convict, Asphyxia from Explosion, Tuberculosis, Burned by Gas Explosion, Pneumonia, Shot by Foreman, Gangrenous Appendicitis, Paralysis."

Mr. Cottenham was one of dozens of convicts who died at the Pratt Mines complex in 1908. This form of government and corporate forced labor ended in 1928 and slipped into the murk of history, discussed little outside the circles of sociologists and penal historians. But the story of Alabama's trade in human labor endures in minute detail in tens of thousands of pages of government records stored in archives, record rooms and courthouses across Alabama.

These documents chronicle another chapter in the history of corporate involvement in racial abuses of the last century. A $4.5 billion fund set up by German corporations, after lawsuits and intense diplomatic pressure from the U.S. and others, began making payments last month to the victims of Nazi slave-labor programs during the 1930s and 1940s. Japanese manufacturers have come under criticism for their alleged use of forced labor during the same period. Swiss banks agreed in 1998 to a $1.25 billion settlement of claims related to the seizure of Jewish assets during the Holocaust.

Traditions of segregation

In the U.S., many companies — real-estate agents that helped maintain rigid housing segregation, insurers and other financial-services companies that red-lined minority areas as off-limits, employers of all stripes that discriminated in hiring —helped maintain traditions of segregation for a century after the end of the Civil War. But in the U.S., recurrent calls for reparations to the descendants of pre-Civil War slaves have made little headway. And there has been scant debate over compensating victims of 20th century racial abuses involving businesses.

The biggest user of forced labor in Alabama at the turn of the century was Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., the U.S. Steel unit that owned the mine where Mr. Cottenham died. Dozens of other companies used convicts, too, many of them now defunct or absorbed into larger businesses. Executives at some of the corporate descendants say they shouldn't be asked to bear responsibility for the actions of executives long dead or the practices of businesses acquired decades ago.

U.S. Steel says it can find no evidence to suggest that the company ever abused or caused the deaths of convicts in Alabama. U.S. Steel spokesman Thomas R. Ferrall says that concerns voiced about convict leasing by Elbert H. Gary, the company's chairman at the time, helped set the stage for "knocking the props out from under" the system. "We think U.S. Steel proper was a positive player in this history . . . was a force for good," Mr. Ferrall says.

The company's early presence in Alabama is still evident a few miles from downtown Birmingham. There, on a hill-side overgrown with brush, hundreds of sunken graves litter the ground in haphazard rows. A few plots bear stones. No other sign or path marks the place. Only a muddy scar in the earth — the recently filled-in mouth of a spent coal mine —suggests that this is the cemetery of the Pratt Mines complex.

When Mr. Cottenham died in 1908, U.S. Steel was still new to convict leasing. But by then, the system was decades old and a well-oiled machine.

After the Civil War, most Southern states set up similar penal systems, involving tens of thousands of African-Americans. In those years, the Southern economy was in ruins. State officials had few resources, and county governments had even fewer. Leasing prisoners to private individuals or companies provided revenue and eliminated the need to build prisons. Forcing convicts to work as part of their punishment was entirely legal; the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1865, outlaws involuntary servitude — except for "duly convicted" prisoners.

Convict leasing in other states never reached the scale of Alabama's program. By the turn of the century, most states had ended the practice or soon would because of opposition on humanitarian grounds and from organized labor. Convict leasing also wasn't well-suited to the still largely agrarian economies of most Southern states.

But in Alabama, industrialization was generating a ravenous appetite for the state's coal and iron ore. Production was booming, and unions were attempting to organize free miners. Convicts provided an ideal captive work force: cheap, usually docile, unable to organize and available when free laborers went on strike.

Incentives to Convict

Under the convict-leasing system, government officials agreed with a company such as Tennessee Coal to provide a specific number of prisoners for labor. State officials signed contracts to supply companies with large blocks of men — often hundreds at a time — who had committed felonies. Companies entered into separate deals with county sheriffs to obtain thou-sands more prisoners who had been convicted of misdemeanors. Of the 67 counties in Alabama, 51 actively leased their convicts, according to one contemporary newspaper report. The companies built their own prisons, fed and clothed the convicts and supplied guards as they saw fit.

In Barbour County, in the cotton country of southern Alabama, nearly 700 men were leased between June 1891 and November 1903, most for $6 a month, according to the leather bound Convict Record still kept in the courthouse base-ment. Most were sent to mines operated by Tennessee Coal or Sloss-Sheffield Steel & Iron Co., another major industrial presence in Birmingham. Sheriffs, deputies and some court offi

Please see Convicts  Page 3F

Worse Than Slavery?

BEFORE PARCHMAN
“Convict-Lease System in the Southern States”

INVESTIGATION OF METHODS OF TREATMENT OF CONVICTS 

LED TO A CHANGE IN HANDLING PRISONERS

By Frank Johnson for the (Jackson, MS) Clarion-Ledger, November 1903

A brief history of the prison system, known as convict leasing, which formerly existed in this State, in common with other Southern States, and exposition of the present Mississippi prison system, may be useful in aiding or promoting the development of a public sentiment that will lead to the abolishment of convict leasing in the State of Georgia.

After the close of the civil war there was established in Mississippi a State prison system by which the convicts were leased to and placed in control of a lessee for hire, with a sub-leasing feature added, and the lessees and the sub-lessees worked the convicts for their own individual profit.

 

This system was established originally in Mississippi by the military government under which the State was placed at the close of the civil war. It was continued by the reconstruction government in 1870, and was retained by the Democratic State government in 1875, and until the year 1890, when it was abolished by the constitutional provision that went into operation on January 1, 1895.

In the year 1884 a batch of convicts was brought to the main prison at Jackson from a sub-lessee's plantation in the Yazoo-Mississippi delta in a deplorable condition, caused by bad treatment of almost every description.

This led to a searching legislative investigation of the treatment of the convicts and of the practical inside workings of the convict system, which brought to light a condition of things in the convict camps, as they were termed, which astonished and shocked the people of the State. At the session of the legislature that year there was some stringent reform legislation on the subject in the expectation of correcting the many evils and abuses that had been exposed by the investigating committee, an anticipation that was never realized.

At that time the convicts who had been previously worked by sub-lessees on their plantations, and a few under railroad contractors in railroad con-struction, were leased to a railroad company then engaged in constructing its road in this State.

Rumors of the bad treatment of the convicts came from time to time from different convict camps on the line of this railroad. This caused a second legislature investigation of the condition and treatment of the convicts in 1888 by a committee of the House, with Hon. J. H. Jones, of Lafayette, Miss., who was afterwards lieutenant governor of the State, as its chairman.

This committee took the testimony of a greater number of witnesses, and through subcommittees inspected the different convict camps.

Nov 23, 1903

The result was a report condemning the whole lease system in every form in which it had been tried. The committees reported that the convicts were not properly housed, that they did not get the proper food and clothing, and that cruelty, overwork, brutal punishments, inhuman treatment of many kinds, a high death rate and a high escape rate were shown to be the characteristics of the convict leasing system. The sick were not properly cared for, and were kept with the well convicts in the structures in which they slept, which were called in the prison vernacular "shacks." These were simply rude stockades roofed over with rough boards and with dirt flooring. Want of ventilation and the want of proper warmth in winter, and a total disregard of the most ordinary principles of sanitation went to make up the sum total of the evils of the system.

It is not surprising, in view of this catalogue of human sufferings and miseries, that the death rate of the convicts one year reached the point of 17 per centum of the entire prison population; another year it went to 15 per centum, and 10 per centum was about the usual death rate.

It is fair to say that the lessee was not personally or directly responsible for the treatment of the convicts, but it was due to the sub-lessees and to the character of the guards and employees who were necessarily a low class of men.

On the heels of these developments the railroad company surrendered the convicts to the State voluntarily, and they were again leased to one lessee, who in turn sub-leased them for work on private cotton plantations in the Yazoo Mississippi delta.

The abuses and evils of the leasing system continued, notwithstanding the severity of the penal statutes that had from time to time been enacted, to secure, if possible, the proper treatment of the convicts. All this reform legislation proved ineffectual for the reason that under this leasing system the convicts were practically at the mercy of the guards.

The convict lease system, with its cruelties and barbarities, was not peculiar to Mississippi. Its abuses were first brought to light in this State, and Mississippi was the first State to abolish the system. Here is what the Mississippi legislative committee of 1888 said of the leasing system in its report to the Legislature:

"We submit that the leasing system, under any form, is wrong in principle and vicious. Experience teaches us that when human labor is farmed out for a consideration, uncontrolled by any interest the contractor may have in the welfare of the laborer, the laborer is very apt to be worked with a view to the highest possible gain to the employer, The system of leasing convicts to individuals or corporations, to be worked by them for profit, simply restores a state of servitude worse than slavery, in this, on that it is without any of the safeguards resulting from the ownership of the slave. If the leasing system is objectionable, that of sub-leasing is doubly so." Appendix to House Journal of 1888.

This report appears also in full, as an appendix to a paper on the subject by ex-Lieut. Gov. J. H. Jones, in Vol. VI. of the publications of the Mississippi Historical Society.

Every effort to abolish the leasing system in the Legislature was defeated by the influences of the lessee lobby, and it was not until the constitutional convention of 1890 that the system was abolished.

In the year 1895 the present convict system was established of working the convicts on State lands, at agricultural pursuits, for the benefit of the State, and under direct and exclusive control. 

The State now owns a large tract of land, all in one body, of first-class alluvial cotton land in the Yazoo-Mississippi delta, known as the Sunflower place, consisting of over 13,00u acres, of which about 6,000 acres are cleared. [The current site at Parchman]

Another first-class cotton plantation, also in the delta, consisting of 1,000 acres, known as "Belmont“; a farm Known as "Oakley," containing 2,000 acres and a farm of 2,000 acres in Rankin county. 

[NOTE: Indeed, both the Belmont plantation and Parchman were the targets of much attention in 1972. Belmont was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 11, 1972. After revealing evidence of all the murders, rapes, beatings and other abuses they had suffered in Parchman, the inmates brought a suit against the prison superintendent in federal district court in 1972, alleging their civil rights under the United States Constitution were being violated by the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment.

In the case, Gates v. Collier (1972), the federal judge William C. Keady found that Parchman Farm violated the Constitution and was an affront to "modern standards of decency." Among other reforms, the accommodation was made fit for human habitation, and the trusty system, (where lifers were armed with rifles and set to guard other inmates), was abolished. The state was required to integrate the prison facilities, hire African-American staff members, and construct new prison facilities.]

These lands are worth at least $250,000. The penitentiary also owns personal property, stock, farming utensils and machinery worth at least $150,000. All of this property has been paid for out of the earnings of the convicts, and has not cost the taxpayers a dollar.

The net cash earnings of the convicts amount to at least $50,000 annually, which is paid into the State treasury. This does not include the labor that is directed to the clearing up of the land on the Sunflower place, and the construction of improvements thereon, and*the improvements of the other lands. 

The convicts are well cared for and properly treated in all respects. They are well housed, well fed and well clothed; the sick are treated in hospitals and sanitary rules are properly observed. They are worked in proper moderation: and no sort of cruelties are permitted. 

The death rate of the convicts has been reduced to one-third of the average death rate that characterized the leasing system. 

About 10,000 acres of the "Sunflower place" will soon be put into cultivation, and when all of the contemplated improvements are made and the system perfected, it is expected that the net income to the State will his not be less than $100,000 per annum. 

A few years ago the State of Louisiana sent commissioners here who examined the practical workings of the Mississippi convict system, and upon son their report this system was adopted to by that State, with results that are satisfactory in all respects. Texas has also adopted the Mississippi penitentiary system.

This is the natural and logical solution of the convict problem where the convict population is largely made up of negroes who are not skilled to workmen, but plantation hands and ordinary day laborers.

The population of the Mississippi penitentiary at present is about 1,100, of which about 90 percent are negroes. It is thus seen that the employment of the convicts at agricultural labor on State lands is the obvious and natural solution of the convict problem in the Southern States.

FRANK JOHNSTON, Jackson, Miss. 1903

The Grave of Eddie Cusic