Good Times, Riches and Sons of Bitches, I've Seen More Than I Can Recall

flimsy charges of loitering, jail them, charge them room and board – which they couldn’t pay in the largely cashless society of pre-WWII rural Alabama. So mine operators would pay off their “debt,” in return for keeping the prisoners in perpetual servitude, typically working them like slaves until the day they died. The convict laborers would be put in shackles, fed a thin gruel and worked 12-hour shifts deep in the mines. They were given a pickaxe and assigned a daily coal quota, which if they didn’t meet, they were horsewhipped at the end of the day. This practice was worse than slavery as the mine owners had utterly no financial stake in whether the convicts survived. If they died, the sheriff could simply provide a new supply. Even to this day, there are said to be untold hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unmarked graves of convict laborers in Pratt City.

Unbelievably, this practice continued from Birmingham’s founding in 1871 until World War II. And though it was used elsewhere in the South, with Birmingham’s unique manufacturing-based economy, convict labor was used here more intensively than anywhere else. The reason it finally stopped then was because Nazi Germany’s public relations, in an effort to justify their treatment of the Jews, attempted to divert the world’s attention to the convict labor situation in the Deep South. Only then did FDR step in and finally end this unspeakably evil practice throughout the South, at last closing this sordid chapter in Birmingham.

It was said that immediately after WWII, we possibly could’ve gotten Delta Airlines to hub here as Birmingham offered a more geographically desirable southeastern distribution point than Atlanta (Georgia.) However, the men (and they were all men) running our economy then were still mostly in the manufacturing sector with a restricted civic vision and cupidity that seemed limitless. They frankly looked at economic growth as a threat to maintaining their low wage workforce. As dispiriting as it is to a booster to admit it, no job growth meant they didn’t have to worry about losing employees -- or having to pay them more to keep them if new companies came in and tried to lure them away. On the other hand, for a city like Atlanta (Georgia), with an emphasis on a retail product like Coca-Cola, population growth meant a more profitable economy. Further complicating matters, two-thirds of the land in Jefferson County was then owned by just two companies: Alabama By-Products and Pittsburgh-based US Steel. Plus, home rule was denied Birmingham by the state legislature. Bottom line, we faced significant headwinds when it came to rallying the leadership around airline growth.

Around this time, one of the more apocryphal quotes from a typical Birmingham manufacturer was a brusque dismissal of the importance of air service by trotting out the old trope “last time I checked, no one was shipping much iron on airplanes.” The fact that we provided pig iron for fashioning into steel in Pittsburgh at super low prices told US Steel that if we diversified our economy, the pricing might change. The same was true for car manufacturers in Detroit. Therefore, even the largest customers for our biggest companies didn’t support any emphasis on re174