Anybody walking past the two women sitting on the patio of Grant Park Coffeehouse the other day would have sworn the pair had been friends since grade school.
They talked easily and laughed loudly, appearing to any passerby as two businesswomen stealing time away from harried schedules to catch up with each other. A seemingly innocuous conversation under a bright morning sun.
But Tonya Groomes and Susan Burnore were talking about secrets, lies and murder. Acts committed generations before they were born and that created a legacy that now binds them.
They will share their stories Monday night in the PBS documentary, "Slavery By Another Name." Based on the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same title by former Wall Street Journal writer Douglas A. Blackmon, the 90-minute film explains how hundreds of thousands of African-American men, women and even children were re-enslaved immediately after the Civil War through an illegal peonage system. Vestiges of the scheme lasted until World War II.
The unpaid labor of those unlawfully enslaved people helped build the fortunes of some of the nation’s most formidable banks, manufacturers and cities, including Atlanta. In turn, the scheme stymied the political, social and economic development of blacks for more than a century.
Groomes, who lives in Lawrenceville, and Burnore, a resident of McDonough, are descendants of that system. Burnore’s family enforced it. Groomes’ family endured it. Both had members who succumbed to it, though for brutally different reasons.
Yet through their budding friendship, the seeds of which were sown in the pages of Blackmon’s book and nurtured through the filming of the documentary, Burnore and Groomes are trying to work through how the old order affected the trajectories of not only their lives but that of the nation’s.
“We have to be willing to accept that not everything in American history is a story of triumph and glory,” Blackmon said. “To appreciate all that has been accomplished in American life, you have to acknowledge how bad things once were.”
Lesson never learned
Groomes has an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and her two brothers have advanced degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.
But for all their education, they never learned in school about the convict labor system that fueled the South’s growth in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
After the abolition of slavery, cheap labor was in short supply. So companies, growers and small-business owners all over the region colluded with law enforcement to arrest African-Americans on the flimsiest of accusations. Once charged, the accused were denied due process. Then as part of their sentence, or to repay inflated “fines” and court costs, they were leased out as virtually free labor and made to toil under inhumane circumstances. They were often worked, literally, to death.
Groomes’ distant cousin, Green Cottenham, was one such soul. Convicted of vagrancy in 1908, he was put to work in an Alabama coal mine to serve his sentence. He died just five months later. His unmarked grave is one of hundreds that pock the hills and hollows outside Birmingham.
Although she is her family’s historian, Groomes never heard of Green Cottenham’s story until Blackmon’s book was published. So when she contacted Blackmon to learn more — which led to her participation in the documentary— there were some in her family who thought it best to let Cottenham’s story fall silent.
“People don’t want to talk about things that make them uncomfortable,” Groomes said.
She was referring as much to the dissidents in her own family as well as those in Burnore’s.
Awful truths revealed
Burnore remembers the day she was 10 years old when her mother sat her down in Monticello, Ga., to tell her a story about her late great-grandfather, J.S. Williams. As the story went, he’d been a wealthy farmer there in Jasper County, a good man who “acquired” workers for his farm. Those workers were hardened criminals, Burnore’s mother told her, who tried to run off and some where killed in the escape attempt by nearby farmers. Williams, however, took the blame for their death because he was an honorable man, and those responsible were poor and he had sons who could work his farm while he was in prison.
There her mother’s story ended.
“When I was a teenager, my brothers and I would talk and say, ‘Well, if they were prisoners, why did anybody go to jail, and why did all his sons leave the state once he went to prison, and if he was so wealthy, why were we so poor?’” Burnore said. “It didn’t add up.”
The truth was that Williams, ordering the black foreman on his farm to help him, methodically and sadistically murdered 11 of the convict workers after federal law enforcement officers began investigating the source of his workforce. Remarkably, both Williams and the foreman were convicted of the murders by an all-white jury. Both men died in prison.
Even though Blackmon’s book recounted the real story through court records, Burnore’s family wanted nothing to do with this version of events.
“There’s nothing positive to learn in this for white families,” Burnore said. “The stories we’ve been told by our families are more positive than the truth. It’s a solemn topic for my family and all the descendants of slave holders. We want to believe we did it in a kind way, but when we confront how brutal it was, there’s nothing happy in those discoveries.”
But Burnore, 59, said she feels that the only way forward is in acknowledging and dealing with those ugly truths and examining the repercussions of that period, repercussions still felt today.
“People say, ‘How could this have happened and no one knew,’” Burnore said. “But the thing is, back then everybody knew. They just thought it was OK. It really is a partial explanation of why more progress wasn’t made by African-Americans after the Civil War,” she said.
Moving forward
Blackmon, an Arkansas native who was raised in Mississippi and now makes his home in Atlanta’s Grant Park, introduced the women last year. At their first meeting, Burnore was worried Groomes would dislike her on sight, given the context of their association.
Yet the more the two talked, the more they discovered they had in common. Burnore had risen from poverty and gone on to get a degree and a job as a manager abroad for IBM. Groomes had had a career as an engineer and in marketing. Both had similar worldviews. And despite their career success, both personally experienced the sting of corporate downsizing. Two energetic women, navigating middle age and reinvention.
“A lot of this is motive and intention, and my intention is not to saddle Susan with guilt,” said Groomes, 46. “It’s to talk and build an honest friendship.”
Because they live so far apart they don’t see each other as often as they would like. But when they do, they talk about their futures. Their pasts have already been acknowledged, so there’s little they have to hide. It’s with knowledge of those pasts that they are seeking a way forward as friends, as equals. Something, they said, they hope viewers of the documentary will do as well.
