The tragic story of Green Cottenham, a young Black man born into post-Emancipation America, represents more than a personal injustice...it exposes a vast and hidden system of neo-slavery that persisted long after the 13th Amendment was ratified. Arrested for “vagrancy” in 1908, Cottenham was one of thousands of African Americans funneled into a penal system specifically designed to re-enslave Black people under the guise of criminal justice. Unable to pay the court-imposed fine, he was leased out to the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, then a subsidiary of U.S. Steel. He died working under horrific conditions in an Alabama coal mine...exhausted, sick, and forgotten.
His story is detailed in "Slavery by Another Name" by Douglas A. Blackmon, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book that shatters the American illusion that slavery ended in 1865. Blackmon’s exhaustive research reveals a systematic and state-sanctioned structure of involuntary servitude that criminalized Black existence through “Black Codes,” targeted arrests, and forced labor...all with the complicity of major U.S. industries.
These laws, passed by white-dominated Southern legislatures after Reconstruction, were explicitly designed to restrict Black freedom. Petty offenses like “vagrancy,” “loitering,” or “insulting a white woman” were used as pretexts to arrest thousands of Black men. Many could not afford to pay court costs or fines and were thus sentenced to months or years of labor, often in deadly industries like mining, railroads, and lumber.
U.S. Steel, Joseph E. Brown’s Dade Coal Company, and countless others built vast fortunes by renting these convicts from the state. In effect, they created a profitable new form of industrial slavery, where bodies were exploited in mines instead of cotton fields. Brown, a former governor of Georgia and staunch Confederate, grew immensely wealthy through convict leasing from 1874 to 1894. His name (and that of his enterprises) belongs in the reckoning for reparations, as do the names of every corporate and political beneficiary of this system.
Although federal prosecutors like Eugene Reese attempted to intervene under laws against debt peonage, their efforts were systematically obstructed. The South had disenfranchised most African Americans by this point, eliminating any political recourse for the victims and ensuring local and federal silence.
Debt bondage...also known as peonage...allowed a person’s labor to be held indefinitely as payment for loosely defined or inflated debts. This practice, outlawed on paper, continued with impunity, revealing how thoroughly the American legal and economic system conspired to maintain white supremacy after slavery’s formal abolition.
It wasn’t until World War II (when the U.S. government needed national unity and an image of democracy abroad) that the convict lease system was finally dismantled. Even then, there was no national apology, no restitution, and certainly no corporate accountability.
The evidence of this forgotten system is not lost...it sits buried in dusty court records, county ledgers, and the National Archives, waiting to be acknowledged. It demands a collective reckoning, not just with memory, but with restitution. Just as German corporations and Swiss banks have faced international scrutiny for their wartime complicity, so too must American corporations like U.S. Steel, and political families like those of Joseph E. Brown, confront the bloody roots of their success.
Reparations are not charity...they are justice. And justice begins with truth. The story of Green Cottenham is not an isolated tragedy...it is a symbol of a national horror that continued well into the 20th century, and whose shadow stretches into the present. To teach our children the truth is not to dishonor America...it is to free it from the lie that it ever truly abolished slavery.
