Convicts, Coal, and the Banner Mine Tragedy

By Robert David Ward and William Warren Rogers

In the late 1870s, Jefferson County, Alabama, and the town of Elyton (near the future Birmingham) became the focus of a remarkable industrial and mining revolution. Together with the surrounding counties, the area was penetrated by railroads. Surprisingly large deposits of bituminous coal, limestone, and iron ore—the exact ingredients for the manufacture of iron and, later, steel—began to be exploited. Now, with transportation, modern extractive techniques, and capital, the region’s geological riches began yielding enormous profits.

A labor force was necessary to maintain and expand the Birmingham area’s industrial boom. Many workers were native Alabamians. There was as well an immigrant ethnic work force, small but important. The native and immigrant laborers became problems for management when workers began affiliating with labor unions and striking for higher wages and better working conditions. In the wake of the management-labor disputes, the industrialists resorted to an artificial work force—convict labor. Alabama’s state and county officials sought to avoid expense and reap profits by leasing prisoners to industry and farms for their labor.

This book is about the men who worked involuntarily in the Banner Coal Mine, owned by the Pratt Consolidated Coal Company. And it is about the repercussions and consequences that followed an explosion at the mine in the spring of 1911 that killed 128 convict miners.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Oct 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817390402

Book preview

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1

Death at the Banner

It was Saturday morning, April 8, 1911, another day to be marked off by the convicts in the Banner Mine prison. Days and weeks and months were the slow but cumulative units of progress that eventually could bring freedom from the coal mine.

That spring morning in the hills of north Alabama the sun first rose at 5:39. It was wrapped in clouds and mist. Those leaving the mine from the night shift would have cool sleeping, and deep in the mine, the rain would not disrupt the incessant labor of the day gang.¹

Before the sun came up the guards had aroused the convicts on the day shift. They left their peculiar swinging beds and ate their breakfast; they made their preparations for the last shift of the week before Sunday finally brought a day of rest. At 5:45 they marched out of the prison enclosure and entered the 1,700-foot chute that ushered them like cattle from prison wall to mine shaft entrance. They walked quietly, inured to another ten hours of back-breaking labor. The burden of another day’s quota of coal would be borne, as usual, with stoic acceptance.²

At 6:00 the night shift left the mine. Night fire boss William Sparks announced that the mine was in good condition. Mine boss John Cantley was not present; thirty minutes later he still had not entered the shaft. As the convicts filed past, the free laborers who ran the cutting machines lounged around the entrance. The shot firers collected their supplies of bituminite and fuse and paper and prepared to follow the convicts into the mine.³

Convict foreman O. W. Spradling, a veteran who had worked with prisoners for twenty years, led his day shift into the shaft and issued his orders. The convict miners dropped off in the side galleries to start their work. They went into four left, five left, six left, seven left, and still deeper into the mine that already ran a mile into the earth. There were five free men in the mine that morning. Foreman Spradling, fifty years of age, lived with his large family in the town of Leeds. The other free men were the shot firers. They handled and fired the explosive bituminite that blasted the coal from the face, permitting the fragments to be loaded into the cars. The shooters were Lee Jones, white; Mose Lockett, black; Dave Wing, black; and Daddy Denson, black. They went down the shaft, and they may have stopped near seven left. Near the shooters was John Wright, a white convict, doing electrical work in the mine as legal penance for assault and battery on a