“America is wrong about the past, wrong about the present, and solemnly pledges to be wrong about the future.” – Frederick Douglass
One day I drove to Oconee Hill Cemetery to visit the mass grave and memorial to 105 enslaved and formerly enslaved Athenians. In 2015, the bones of these African Americans were “discovered” when workers bulldozed around Baldwin Hall on the University of Georgia campus. They were buried under a parking lot.
The university initially denied that the bones were those of black people. Then, to make matters worse, after DNA analysis showed the remains were of African descent, UGA officials decided to rebury them in a mass grave on Oconee Hill, the city’s formerly all-white cemetery . That happened in March 2017, with most of the African American community unaware of the ceremony. “They will be placed near their white masters again,” my friend Fred Smith Sr., a descendant of the enslaved people of Athens, told me at the time.
Arriving at the sprawling 150-year-old cemetery (where Confederates, slaveholders, and Klansmen are buried), I walked down a slight hill to the site of the mass grave. It is well removed from the graves of other whites living in the area. I stood and silently read the inscription on the granite memorial stone, placed a stone on it and said a prayer.
As I looked up the hill into the morning sun, I noticed several prisoners working about a hundred yards away. One sat on a lawnmower, another cleaned headstones and sidewalks with leaf blowers. A prisoner ate weeds near tombstones surrounding a weather-beaten mausoleum. A prison guard stood nearby, leaning on a pickup truck and keeping an eye on his captive crew.
I realized that these hilltop prisoners, almost all of whom were black, were busy tending to “Floor Lot F2,” the centuries-old burial site of James Monroe Smith.
After Reconstruction, Smith literally made his personal and political fortune at the expense of Georgia prisoners. Between 1880 and his death in 1915, Smith was perhaps the most notorious leader of Georgia’s brutal convict-rental system.
John Cole Vodicka Smith’s Mausoleum in Oconee Hill Cemetery.
After the Civil War, until it was largely “abolished” in 1908, Georgia’s convict lease system became, alongside lynching, the most brutal manifestation of black oppression in the South. The infamous “Black Codes” had been introduced by the state legislature, laws that targeted the recently enslaved and jailed blacks for “crimes” including petty offenses such as vagrancy, swearing, fighting, mischief, offensive gestures, or just being a nuisance to white people. To avoid captivity, black workers took what they could, no matter the terms.
Once black men (and occasionally women) were imprisoned, white landowners routinely paid the prisoners’ fines, and the prisoners were released on paternity. Convict debts were rarely forgiven. Prisoners languished under their white master’s dun for months, sometimes years. Chained, brutally and frequently whipped, the convicts lived in unsanitary, disease-ridden environments. Many were tortured. Some died.
One of James Monroe Smith’s wards described himself as “slaves of a chain gang”. Later, historian Fletcher Green described Georgian forced tenancy as a “system that left a trail of shame and death that could only be paralleled in the persecutions of the Middle Ages or the prison camps of Nazi Germany.”
James Monroe Smith took advantage of the convict leasehold system and grew his small farm in Oglethorpe County into one of Georgia’s largest postbellum plantation businesses. At one point Smith had interests in a state hospital, small college, railroad and businesses in Atlanta. Not only did he have several thousand prisoners working on his plantation, but he leased thousands more to other farmers, corporations, and prominent politicians across the state. At his death, the estimated value of his estate was more than $4 million. He was the second richest man in Georgia. He named his plantation – much of it established and tended by convicts – Smithonia in vain.
By the turn of the 19th century, Smithonia boasted the state’s largest cotton gin, grist mill, grist mill, woodworking shop, blacksmith shop, saw mills, brick factory, numerous warehouses, a hotel, post office, hundreds of homes, and six schools. Today the plantation is a historic district just 24 km east of Athens.
Smith also brought his wealth to politics, serving in the Georgia legislature in the 1870s and 1880s. In 1906 he ran unsuccessfully for governor. John Hill, one of the prisoners forced to work at Smithonia, said, “If the Lord rules heaven, Jim Smith rules earth.”
In the years leading up to Smith’s death, lawmakers began investigating gruesome and first-hand accounts of the “diabolical cruelty” going on on plantations and businesses that hired prisoners for their labor. Court cases were filed describing the appalling treatment of forced laborers. Smithonia was included. Investigators found evidence that a number of Smith’s convicts died of consumption, heart failure, and sunstroke. Half a dozen others had been killed by guards. A legislative report astutely observed that this brutal treatment of prisoners “could only thrive in an ex-slave state where ex-slaves made up the majority of the convicts”.
Beginning in 1908, Georgian law prohibited prisoners charged with misdemeanor offenses from being rented to private institutions. This led to the emergence of labor camps in cities and counties across the state, and with them the use of chain gangs. Clarke County stopped renting out its prisoners in the late 1920s and began using them for road work, on its county farm, and at the landfill. The overworked, chained prisoners often lived little better than those in a convict tenant camp.
In 1955, chain gangs were finally outlawed in Georgia. But the district labor camps with their free work for inmates continued to exist.
Today, the Athens-Clarke County Correctional Institution (ACCCI) is one of 21 County Work Camps in Georgia. A total of 4,646 men are currently incarcerated in these facilities. ACCCI houses 115 prisoners and almost all of them are used by and for the local government. Regulations state that the ACCCI exists to “provide a workforce pool for various departments of the Athens-Clarke County government, the Georgia State Patrol and the Northeast Georgia Police Academy.” Prisoners work in and around the courthouse and public library, at UGA soccer games, help move voting machines, and mow grass on city streets. Athens-Clarke County daily labor value is $35.97 per prisoner. The county camp’s unpaid labor saved taxpayers $1.1 million in 2020, according to ACC records.
I finished my visit to the African American mass grave site. The precinct prisoners completed the refreshment of property F-2 and moved on to another section of Oconee Hill Cemetery. I walked up the incline to my car and stopped in front of James Monroe Smith’s mausoleum. The building dominates the hilltop. I confess I could not bring myself to say a prayer, nor did I lay a stone near Smith’s grave.
Instead, I left the eroded mausoleum and looked back at the granite marker where the bones of 105 unnamed blacks were interred. At the same time I heard the sound of a leaf blower again and spotted the ACCCI prisoners now working around other graves – perhaps, I wondered, their current Guardian relatives?
Here in Athens, the bones of the slaves are surrounded by the bones of the slave owners. And these enslavement graves—at least one of whom made his fortune in quasi-slavery in the early 20th century—are tended by the forced laborers of our day.
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