B. B. Comer - Comer Plantation

Comer Plantation

In 1885 B. B. Comer moved his family to Anniston. The Comers had built their wealth through slave labor before the Civil War and leased convict labor afterward.

His brother John Comer ran the family plantation in Barbour County. He operated the plantation using leased 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 1883, Richard Dawson, the Alabama Prison Inspector, 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."

At this time, residents of Barbour County were notorious for kidnapping and selling African Americans into bondage, to exploit their labor after the war to rebuild the wealth of Alabama's elite.

The peonage scheme in the American South grew out of enforcement of the "Black Codes" passed by the states immediately after the American Civil War, which sought to control the movement and labor of freedmen, who were sometimes migrating to reunite families and who wanted to do sharecropping rather than work for wages. States required freedmen to work or be defined as vagrants, and sought to regulate behavior by narrowly defining what was acceptable, including prohibition of gambling. Freedmen could also be arrested for such charges as insulting behavior or 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, use white juries to convict them of trumped-up charges, and fine them for their actions plus court costs. Most cash-strapped African Americans could not pay such 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.

Although illiterate, the prisoners were forced to sign labor 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 extension of labor contracts. Researchers have found that the bondsmen were charged for food and medical care; this meant that they were forced to incur debts so they would have to keep working as prisoners. 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 1890, B.B. Comer relocated with his family to Birmingham, where he was involved in successful business pursuits, including cornmeal and flour mills. He also served as the president of City National Bank. Later, he liquidated the bank to focus on his other business pursuits.

In 1903, the US Attorney General Philander C. Knox, of the Theodore Roosevelt administration (1901-1909), assigned Warren Reese and Julius Stern to investigate the charges of peonage or slavery in Alabama. More than forty such cases in Coffee, Geneva, Covington, and Barbour counties were investigated by these Federal agents.