B. B. Comer

Braxton Bragg Comer
33rd Governor of Alabama
In office January 14, 1907 – January 17, 1911
Lieutenant	Henry B. Gray
Preceded by	William D. Jelks
Succeeded by	Emmet O'Neal
United States Senator from Alabama
In office March 5 – November 2, 1920 Alongside: Oscar Underwood
Appointed by	Thomas Kilby
Preceded by	John H. Bankhead
Succeeded by	J. Thomas Heflin
Personal details
Born	November 7, 1848 Barbour County, Alabama
Died	August 15, 1927 (aged 78)
Political party	Democratic
Spouse	Eva Jane Comer
Children	Sally Bailey Comer John Fletcher Comer James McDonald Comer Eva Mignon Comer Catherine Comer Braxton Bevelle Comer Eva Comer Braxton Bragg Comer, Jr. Hugh M. Comer
Alma mater	University of Alabama University of Georgia Emory and Henry College

Braxton Bragg Comer (November 7, 1848 – August 15, 1927) was an American Democratic politician who was the 33rd Governor of Alabama from 1907 to 1911, and a United States Senator in 1920.

Early life and education

Comer was born in 1848 at old Spring Hill, Barbour County, Alabama, the fourth son of John Fletcher and Catherine Drewry Comer. B.B. Comer began his education at the age of ten under the tutelage of E.N. Brown. In 1864 Comer went to the University of Alabama, but in April 1865 was forced to leave when General John T. Croxton's troops burned the university. He then enrolled at the University of Georgia in Athens, where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society. He transferred to Emory and Henry College in Virginia, where he graduated in 1869 with AB and AM degrees.

Early business career

Following graduation, Comer returned to Spring Hill and helped to manage the family plantation. He also operated a general store. He primarily grew corn and cotton on what became a 30,000-acre (120 km²) plantation. He operated his Barbour County plantation after he moved his family to Anniston, Alabama in 1885.

Marriage and family

In 1872 he married Eva Jane Harris of Cuthbert, Georgia. He built a large house for them at Comer Station, Barbour County.

Comer Plantation

In 1885 B. B. Comer moved his family to Anniston. His brother John continued to run the Comer family plantation in Barbour County. He operated the plantation using bonded forced convict labor, which essentially amounted to slavery, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Comer Plantation leased African-American convicts from the State of Alabama. After a visit to the Comer Plantation in Barbour County in the early 1880s, Alabama's Prison Inspector Richard Dawson wrote:

"Things in bad order. No fireplace in cell. No arrangements for washing. No Hospital. Everything filthy- privy terrible- convicts ragged many barefooted- very heavily ironed."

Considered one of the leading families of Alabama, like others of the planter elite, the Comers had built their wealth through slave labor before the Civil War and leased convict labor afterward.

At this time, residents of Barbour County were notorious for kidnapping and selling African Americans into bondage, to exploit their labor to rebuild the post-Civil War wealth of Alabama's leading families. Attorney General Knox, of the Theodore Roosevelt administration, assigned Warren Reese and Julius Stern to investigate the charges of slavery. More than forty such cases in Coffee, Geneva, Covington, and Barbour counties were investigated by these Federal agents in 1903.

The peonage scheme in use throughout the State of Alabama, and put into place in various Comer Family enterprises, depended on the entrapment and conviction of African Americans on trumped-up charges such as vagrancy, insulting behavior, rudeness to white women, or gambling. By the 1880s, local and state officials manipulated the system to entrap African Americans. Local officials would arrest African Americans, convict them of the trumped up charges, and fine them for their actions plus court costs. Most cash-strapped African Americans could not pay the fines. The state leased them as prisoners to industry and planters for the amount of the fines (usually for $50– $100). Prisoners had to work off the amount they owed to the state through forced labor on farms, plantations, mills and mines. Generally illiterate men and women were forced to sign contracts, often including stipulations that they would be subject to the same conditions as other prisoners, which meant leg irons, being unable to leave their place of work without being subject to punishment, and further extension of contracts. Researchers have found that the bondsmen were charged for food and medical care, in effect, incurring other debts so they were always working as prisoners. On plantations, mines, and mills, owned by Alabama families such as the Comers, local and state officials collaborated during the 1880s and 90s, to convert black tenant farmers and share croppers into convict labor. Once convicted of petty crimes, these citizens were subject to imprisonment, shackles, and the lash, and worked in the same fields where a few weeks earlier they had been independent, free laborers.

In Anniston, Comer invested the income from his plantation to expand his business pursuits and joined with S.B. Trapp to open Comer & Trapp, a grocery store. He lived in Anniston for five years before "selling his interest in the firm." He relocatd to Birmingham where he was involved in successful business pursuits, including cornmeal, flour, and textile mills. He also served as the president of City National Bank. "Later, he liquidated the bank" to focus on his other business pursuits.

Comer's Role in the Post Reconstruction Disenfranchisement of African Americans

While living in Spring Hill, Comer served on the Barbour County Commissioners Court from 1874–1880, helping to "redeem that county from Republican Party rule." This quote from Comer signaled his implicit support for post reconstruction elimination of political participation by African Americans by physical and mental intimidation, use of the onerous poll tax, literacy tests, and other coercive methods. White Americans in the 1880s had literacy rates slightly better than African Americans- but men with the right to vote prior to 1865 (and their descendants) were grandfathered and exempted from these requirements in Alabama. This exemption for whites resulted in African Americans being excluded as a class from politics post reconstruction and, ultimately, the demise of liberal Republicanism in Alabama. Thus his wish to "redeem his county from Republican Party" rule was realized to the detriment of Alabama's African American citizens freed by the 13th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Comer's one term as Governor reinforced this racist and discriminatory view of African American political participation and his support for the re-enslavement of African Americans via Alabama's peonage-convict system.

Eureka Mines

An important source of Comer family wealth was the development of the Eureka mines in Shelby County, south of Birmingham. The manager of the labor force was J.W. Comer, the brother of Governor B. B. Comer. The Eureka complex consisted of two mines, one mined by free miners, and the other by convicts leased under the peonage system. The vast majority of forced laborers were African Americans, who were convicted at a rate of four times that of white citizens. The Comer mines were developed by "primitive excavation techniques and relentless, atavistic physical force."

Ezekial Archey, a prisoner leased to the Comer-backed enterprise at Eureka, wrote that the convicts lived in a stockade "filled with filth and vermin. Gunpowder cans were used to hold human waste that would fill up and 'run all over our beds where prisoners were shackled hand and foot for the night". Later he wrote to a Roosevelt Administration investigator that

"[JW]Comer {the Governor’s brother and manager of the mine} is a hard man. I have seen men come to him with their shirts a solid scab on their backs and he would let the hide grow on and take it off again. I have seen him hit men 100 to 160 times with a ten prong strop and then say thay was not whipped. He would go off after an escaped man come one day with him and dig his grave the same day."

Between 1878 and 1880, twenty-five bonded convicts whose contracts were sold to the Comer-backed Eureka mines died. Their bodies were dumped into shallow earthen pits on the edge of the mine site. Jonathan Good testified to the Joint Commission, created by the Roosevelt Administration to investigate the use of peonage in Alabaman enterprises, saying that J.W. Comer, the brother of the Governor and manager of the Eureka mines,

" ordered a captured black escapee to lie on the ground and the dogs were biting him. He begged piteously to have the dogs taken off of him, but Comer refused to allow it. Comer...stripped him naked took a stirrup strap, doubled it, wet it,, bucked him and whipped him, unmercifully whipped him, over half and hour. The Negro begged them to take a gun and kill him. They left him in a Negro cabin where... he died within a few hours."

Avondale Mills

Another of Comer's enterprises was the Avondale Mills. The Trainer Family—a family in the textile business in Chester, Pennsylvania—envisioned a plan to expand its business into the South by way of the new and growing industrial city, Birmingham, Alabama. In exchange for stock in the company, Frederick Mitchell Jackson, Sr., and other Birmingham civic leaders, agreed to commit $150,000 to help the Trainer family fulfill its plan. Jackson, president of Birmingham’s Commercial Club, a forerunner of the Birmingham Area Chamber of Commerce, pledged his help in order "to help give employment to those badly in need of it in the young and struggling city of Birmingham." B.B. Comer’s son, James McDonald Comer, later recalled that his father was motivated by the "feeling that Birmingham needed an industry which could employ women as well as men." The Avondale Mills has been shown to have used inexpensive, and flexible, child labor.

The Trainer family accepted the pledge of financial assistance and sought an Alabamian to invest $10,000 in the project and assume presidency of the mill. In 1897, they approached Braxton Bragg Comer, whose plantation used forced peonage labor, and who had invested in the Eureka mines. The future governor accepted the offer, invested in the enterprise and, from 1897 until his death in 1927, B.B. Comer served as president of Avondale Mills.

In 1897 Comer built the first mill in Avondale, land that would become part of Birmingham, Alabama. During the first year of its operation, Avondale Mills used 4,000 bales of cotton, and by 1898, Avondale Mills employed 436 laborers and generated $15,000 in profit. By the time B.B. Comer became governor of Alabama in 1907, Avondale Mills declared $55,000 in profit and produced almost 8,000,000 yards of material. By the turn of the century, Avondale Mills had set the course for future development.

"Avondale Mills began with 30,000 spindles in the first mill in Birmingham and grew over the next thirty years to include ten mills in seven communities, with a total of 282,160 spindles. The mills [included]: Eva Jane, the Central, the Sally B, and the Catherine in Sylacauga; the Alexander City Cotton Mills, the Sycamore Mills, Mignon and Bevelle Mill, and the Pell City Manufacturing Company."

As cotton prices fell, poor white farmers were forced to turn to sharecropping and tenancy; some of those were willing to give up farming and move to town. One white mill worker said, we "made good money compared with the farm." Another white sharecropper said, "Mebbe we ain’t got much, but we sure has got more." And at least one white ex-farmer remembered the move with considerable enthusiasm: "Yeah! Oh we just thought we had almost come to heaven when we got up here. We didn’t have to pick cotton, chop cotton, like that. Just go to work and come back and nothing else to do. And we really had it made when we come here."

Lewis Hines, an American sociologist and photographer, visited the mills and documented his findings with photographs during 1910. Hine's photographs and interviews in 1910 showed that numerous children were employed at Avondale Mills with "mere weeks of education if any." At first the children were not "officially" employed, but were recruited to assist their parents in completing strenuous twelve-hour shifts in the mill.

In Avondale Mills, Hines noted numerous examples of child labor and abuse of children, including that of the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds Mary and Miller Gilliam. Their father, had removed them from school to work at the mills; he had no job at the time.

Hines recorded, as he snapped photographs of children lined up at Avondale Mills owned locations, that "none of the children would admit to being younger than twelve years of age ". He wrote the "The Mill bosses...arrived at school anytime during the day to remove children to work at the Mill.". When demand for textiles was low the children were allowed to return to school- making the children a ready made, cheap source of flexible labor.

At twelve years of age children could begin work at Avondale Mills as bobbin doffers. This was a fast paced job that required dexterity but little technical skill. The room the children would change bobbins in would be filled with lint and would leave the lungs of the child doffers full of debris leading to brown lung disease later in life.".

Comer's reaction to Hines' exposure of the terrible conditions under which these children employed was that the children were working at the insistence of their parents and neither that he, nor the state, had any right to interfere. Stopping the exploitation of child labor might have undermined much of the financial success of Avondale Mills. Cotton Mills in the south were successful fundamentally, not because of the decline in farming incomes, nor the decline in artisanship, but because of the abundance of flexible,willing, and cheap child labor.

The inexpensive shelter provided by coton mills such as Avondale Mills encouraged families to become deeply entrenched in the mill, and as long as the family occupied the dwellings, the tenants were obligated to work in the mill and supply labor. There was another price to pay for using Avondale Mills' housing. If a worker missed church or drank alcohol they faced discipline and possible loss of their home and employment.

Railroad Commission

Even before Comer became president of Avondale Mills, he was a vocal advocate for railroad reform but not for organized labor. Alabama businessmen were at a disadvantage when competing for business with companies based in Georgia due to that state’s lower freight rates. Investigations by the Birmingham Commercial Club and the Birmingham Freight Bureau, organizations in which Comer had major roles, found evidence of discrimination by the railroads. Comer believed giving more power to the state’s Railroad Commission was the best way to end the discrimination and lower rates to a level that would allow Alabama companies to compete with those in Georgia. However, the state legislature and delegates to the 1901 Constitutional Convention did not strengthen the commission’s power. Nevertheless, the new 1901 Constitution did indirectly aid Comer’s push for railroad reform. The disenfranchisement of African Americans and poor whites reduced the chance of an electoral challenge to railroad reforms such as those Comer supported. When the Railroad Commission did not change rates after two more years had passed, Comer switched his tactics from being a vocal critic to running for a seat on the commission, which had recently become an elected position. His campaign called for limiting the power of the railroads in favor of shipping. In 1904, his successful election over incumbent John V. Smith gave him the presidency of the commission but he quickly realized he had little power due to the other two commissioners siding with the railroads. Three years into his term as president, he came to the conclusion that the only way for him to have enough power to enact true railroad reform was to become governor.

Gubernatorial campaign

"The 1906 gubernatorial campaign in the Democratic primary…was one of the most memorable in Alabama’s history. The Democratic Party dropped the word ‘Conservative’ from its formal name, demonstrating that it was now comfortable with a more progressive platform." Both of the party’s gubernatorial candidates were staunchly progressive on almost every topic. Lieutenant Governor Russell M. Cunningham of Birmingham did not support progressive railroad reform, and gained support from the industry. "Comer was a better campaigner and orator than Cunningham, and his verbal attacks on the railroads so aroused Alabama audiences that he won the primary with 61 percent of the vote." The Barbour County native also defeated Asa E. Stratton of the Republican Party and J.N. Abbott of the Socialist Party of America in the November 1906 election. Comer’s plan to enact progressive reform of the railroads, as well as in other areas such as education, appeared a strong possibility due to the progressives constituting a majority in the newly elected state legislature.

Railroad Reform

Comer "devoted most of his inaugural address to the issue of railroad reform and requested the legislature pass 20 separate laws to give the railroad commission strong rate-making and enforcement powers." The like-minded legislature passed his railroad reforms with only a few changes. Through these new laws, Comer finally achieved the railroad reform he had so long desired. The rates were lowered to a level similar those to Georgia and other southern states, thus allowing Alabama businesses to better compete with their counterparts in neighboring states.

In addition to railroad regulation, the state legislature "added a provision that would revoke the state business license of any corporation bringing suit in federal court on any issue already before a state court." L&N Railroad and other railroads challenged the new railroad statues in federal court. The disagreement between the state government and railroad continued after Comer had left office, however his initial goal "to give the state increased regulatory power over railroad freight rates" was achieved.

Comer's administration

Seven thousand free (mostly white) miners went on strike at the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad and other mining operations in 1908. They were joined by five hundred African-American convicts leased under the peonage system in Alabama. Company officials petitioned the state to break up the strike with state militia. To keep operating, TCIRR officials pushed the enslaved African American convicts to work extremely long hours. White foreman brought in from the country side other bonded African Americans, collected their wages, and worked them for food and water as well. William Millin, a prominent African-American union leader, protested these conditions and was arrested. A mob took him from jail and lynched him. Another African-American organizer was hanged in a lynching a week later. Governor Comer issued orders mobilizing the state militia to break up the strikers and their organized camps.

In mid-August 1908, a delegation of prominent Birmingham citizens visited leaders of the striking miners and issued an explicit threat. They said that unless the strike ended, Birmingham would "make Springfield (where 12,000 whites had burned down the African-American section of the city) look like six cents.". Governor Comer issued the following statement: "We are outraged at the attempts to establish social equality between black and white miners." He added that he would "not tolerate eight or nine thousand idle niggers in the state of Alabama."

While Comer was most known for railroad reform, he supported a broad platform. He was also known for educational reform for whites and for supporting Prohibition of alcohol. He did little, however, to invest in the education of African Americans in the segregated public school system.

Educational reform

Comer’s educational reforms to improve education for whites were funded by increases in revenues to the state. A State Board of Assessors was created "to equalize taxation by equalizing property values throughout the state and establishing franchise taxes for businesses." The reassessment of property values angered the large property owners who saw their property taxes increase. However the increases in state tax revenues came about not through taxation reforms (although this probably stabilized tax revenues) but through the increase revenues generated from convicts leased from the state to private enterprise. Regardless the increases in spending for education only benefited the white citizens of Alabama. The increase in the state funds allowed him to devote money to much needed educational reforms for whites including the building of rural schools and county high schools (at least one in each county) and increasing the appropriations made to the University of Alabama, the Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn, the nine agricultural schools, the normal schools, and the Girl's Technical School at Montevallo. In addition, the state took control of the Alabama Boy’s Industrial School. Comer’s educational reforms continue to affect the state’s educational system over a century later.

It is important to note, however, that over twenty five percent of the state's revenue in 1910 was funded by the leasing of convicted African American back to private enterprise under the peonage system. In essence many of the improvements in the state's infrastructure during Comer's term as Governor was funded by the slave labor of African Americans for the benefit of the state's white citizens. For white students the curriculum level was raised and literacy increased, but not for African Americans who suffered under Jim Crow laws and the separate but equal doctrine. Comer did invest into education- but the amount of money per capita spent on African American children was approximately one seventh that of White Children. Literacy climbed dramatically as a result for whites but lagged for blacks (less than 50% for African Americans by 1920) because of the dismal state of education for African American citizens.

Prohibition

Prohibition was one issue upon which progressives were not united. Some progressives believed prohibition should be a local issue, while others supported state laws against the sale of alcohol. During his gubernatorial campaign and first two years as governor, Comer viewed prohibition as a local matter. "By 1908…50 of the state’s 67 counties had voted for prohibition." Despite the majority of the counties being dry, the powerful Anti-Saloon League pushed for statewide prohibition. Other prohibition groups rallied to the League’s push for a statewide law, forcing Comer to call the legislature into special session to decide the matter. The 1909 special session enacted prohibition statewide, "but, not content with a mere statute, they also proposed a constitutional amendment to end the sale of liquor." Comer traveled the state to garner support for the proposed amendment but his and the Anti-Saloon League’s support of it was not enough to overcome opposition and the amendment failed to win the necessary votes.

Other Areas of Reform

In addition to railroad and educational reform and prohibition, Comer also had success in the following areas.

He helped to establish a tuberculosis sanatorium as part of his use of state funds to improve public health.

He strengthened insurance laws.

"When President Theodore Roosevelt suggested that the nation’s governors should join him in conserving the country’s natural resources, Comer and the legislature established the Alabama Soil Conservation Department to oversee a public park system in Alabama."

He increased transportation funding to improve roads.

Later life

As state law prevented governors from running for successive terms, Comer was ineligible for the 1910 gubernatorial election. When he ran for re-election in 1914, Comer was defeated by an "unlikely coalition" of railroads, organized labor, and supporters of local option [for prohibition].

In the spring of 1920, Governor Thomas Kilby appointed Comer to serve the remaining months of the late John H. Bankhead’s term in the United States Senate. He did not seek election when the term expired.

Following his short time in the Senate, Comer spent the remainder of his life following his pre-political business pursuits.

Comer died on August 15, 1927. His wife, Eva Jane, had died on March 6, 1920 while he was serving in the Senate. He and his wife were survived by their eight children Sally Bailey, John Fletcher, James McDonald, Eva Mignon, Catherine, Braxton Bevelle, Eva, Braxton Bragg, Jr., and Hugh M. Comer. He was buried in Birmingham's Elmwood Cemetery.

Legacy

By the mid-twentieth century, Comer was hailed as a reformer who brought Alabama's primary and secondary educational systems into the mainstream. He was also hailed as an enlightened business man for bringing Avondale Mills to Birmingham and Central Alabama. He was also a product of his time, depending on a system of segregation and white supremacy to earn profits. The family wealth that Comer used for political purposes, and for expansion of the Comer business empire, was built through the use of forced convict labor of bonded African Americans, the exploited labor of underage children at Avondale Mills (and subsidiary plants), and through investments in the Eureka Mines.

His attempts at improving Alabama's educational systems did not provide sufficiently for African-American children. Although literacy rates for whites increased during his tenure as governor, his administration achieved little for blacks. The White Democratic legislature consistently underfunded African-American education.

As governoHowever laudable Comer's record with respect to reforms within the state his one term as Governor reinforced the disenfranchisement of African Americans in Alabama. Backed by the power of the State of Alabama he was successful in turning back the peonage investigation into the false imprisonment and selling into bondage of African Americans.

Numerous institutions and places were named for him:

• B.B. Comer Memorial High School, B.B. Comer Memorial Elementary School, and B.B. Comer Memorial Library, all in Sylacauga, once home to one of Avondale’s largest mills.
• B.B. Comer Hall at the University of Alabama houses the Department of Modern Languages.
• The federal building in Birmingham.
• Braxton Bragg Comer Hall at Auburn University houses offices and labs for the School of Agriculture.
• BB Comer Bridge in Scottsboro, Alabama.

References

• History of the University of Georgia, Thomas Walter Reed, Imprint: Athens, Georgia : University of Georgia, ca. 1949, p.900
• "Alabama Governors: Braxton Bragg Comer", Alabama Department of Archives and History
• "Comer, Braxton Bragg, (1848-1927)", Biographical Directory of the United States Congress
• "Avondale Mills", Lynn Price McWhorter
• "Braxton Bragg Comer (1907-11)", David Alan Harris
• "Braxton Bragg Comer", Alabama Men's Hall of Fame
• "Braxton Bragg Comer, Birmingham, Alabama", Gary Mock, 2010
• RG60 NA "Peonage Files, RG 60 NA ff5280-17119": National Archives
• Curtin, Mary Ellen. "Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900". Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
• Kelly, Brian. "Race, Class and Power in the Alabama Coalfields 1908-1921". Urbana: University of Illinois Free Press, 2001.
• Blackmon, Douglas. "Slavery By Another Name". New York. Anchor Books, 2008.
• Bond, Horace Mann. "Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel". Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994.
• Dawson Richard. "Diary of Richard Dawson".Alabama Department of Archives and History 1883
• ADAH, "Convicts at Hard Labor for the County in the State of Alabama on the First Day of March 1883," microfiche
• Tuskegee Institute. "The Lynching Century: African Americans Who Died in Racial Violence in the United States 1865-1965
• Hall. "Like a Family the Making of a Southern Cotton Mill".Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1987
• Flamming. "Creating the Modern South: Mill Hands and Managers". 25 Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 1992.

External links

• Find-A-Grave profile for B. B. Comer
• Alabama State Archives B. B. Comer page
• Shadow of Slavery
• Race, Class and Power in the Alabama Coalfields 1908-1921
• 1903 New York Times Article on Peonage and African Americans in Alabama
• 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica Entry State of Alabama- references to peonage and disenfranchisement of African Americans
• The Southern South
• Extracts from Dothan Eagle 1909-10 Governor Comer seeks pardon for peonage convictions
• MIT Forum on Slavery and Reparations
• 50 Years of Peonage
• Excerpts from Chesnutt, Charles W. "Peonage, or the New Slavery." Voice of the Negro, 1 (Sept. 1904): 394-97.
• Article in The Washington Post Slavery Did Not End With The Civil War. One Man's Odyssey Into a Nation's Secret Shame. by Len Cooper Sunday, June 16 1996; Page F01
• Records of the National Negro Business League 1900-1919
• United States Congress. "B. B. Comer (id: C000657)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
• Braxton Bragg Comer entry in the Encyclopedia of Alabama
• Baker, Ray Following the Color Line 1908