Rules were a major part of Lee’s household growing up. But it wasn’t until he started to dig into his family’s history that he began to realize that the rules that he was expected to follow had a long, dark history. In this episode, Lee speaks with historian Dr. Daina Ramey Berry to better understand the life of Lee’s great-great-grandmother Charity, an enslaved woman, and learn about how the slave codes and Black codes shaped her life, and the lives of her descendants. Later Lee speaks with Professor Sally Hadden to learn about the origins of the slave codes, and how they’ve influenced the rules that govern our modern society.
We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse, and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, WhatHappenedInAlabama.org - listener discretion is advised.
Hi - this is Lee Hawkins and thanks for joining me for episode six of What Happened In Alabama. In this episode we dive into the slave codes and Black codes - what they were, and how they show up in our current day to day. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to go back and listen to the prologue first. That’ll give you some context for putting the whole series in perspective. Do that, and then join us back here. Thank you so much.
INTRO
Even when we don’t realize it, life is governed by rules. We often say we “should” do things a certain way without knowing why. The truth is, many actions have root causes that trace back to how we were raised and what we were socialized to believe – both by our families and the societies we live in.
In dictionaries, rules are described as explicit or understood regulations governing conduct. We see these guidelines in everything from the order and cadence of the written and spoken word, to how we move from A to B on the roads, or the ways different sports are played - the “rules of the game.”
But “rule” also means to have control or dominion over people or places.This was the way of colonialism around the world for centuries. And this control manifests as laws and codes that yes, create order, but can also have the power to suppress freedoms - and instill fear to ensure compliance.
In past episodes you’ve heard me talk about the rules of my household growing up in Maplewood, Minnesota, and the many layers of history that get to the root of those rules. Talking with my father and other family members who lived under Jim Crow apartheid provided one piece of understanding. Learning of my white ancestry from Wales dating back to the 1600s offered another.
But we have to revisit my ancestors on both sides of enslavement, white and Black – back to the physical AND mental trauma that was experienced to really connect the dots to the tough rules that governed the household, and why my parents and some other relatives felt they needed to whip their children. Also, why so many other racial stereotypes were both imposed on us by society, and often internalized by some within our Black families and communities.
For that, we have to dig deeper into the story of my Grandma Charity, her experiences as a Black girl born enslaved and kept in bondage well into adulthood, and the rules that governed her life, both during her time of captivity and after that, under Jim Crow apartheid.
This is What Happened in Alabama: The Slave Codes.
[music up, and a beat]
I can't tell you how many thousands of hours I’ve spent digging through genealogy reports, archives and police records looking for documentation about my family. Sometimes I can do the work from my computer at home, other times, for the really specific details around my dad’s family, I’ve had to make the trip back to Alabama, to gather oral history, go to courthouses, walk through cemeteries, and drive around.
[sifting through papers]
It can be slow and tedious work. Sometimes you think you’ve found a lead that’s going to take you somewhere that you could have never imagined - but then you realize it’s a dead end. Sometimes, you get a huge rush of endorphins when you make a discovery that blows open the doors that once seemed forever closed.
One night, in 2015, I’d recently received my DNA results showing a strong connection to the white side of the Pugh family. I was sitting in my dark living room, looking into the illuminated screen of my computer at two in the morning. I’d just found the last will and testament of Jesse Pugh, a white ancestor who genealogists surmise is my great great great grandfather, from Pike County, Alabama. We met Jesse Pugh in the last episode.
The will was dated March 24, 1852. Jesse Pugh died two years later.
To his wife and children, he left hundreds of acres of land, household furnitures, plantation tools, farming animals, bushels of corn, and a number of enslaved people – all listed as “Negroes.”
As I pored over the details of the will, I came across a name I’d heard before: Charity.
I read it over again.
“Second, I give and bequeath to my son Mastin B. a Negro Girl, Charity…”
Fixating on those words,“a Negro girl, Charity” my eyes welled up.
She was left to Jesse Pugh’s son, Mastin B. Pugh.
Charity was the grandmother Uncle Ike told me and my father about on our trip to Alabama back in 1991. I remember Uncle Ike telling us about how, when Charity's son, his own father Isaac Pugh Sr., acquired his own farm, mean ol’ Grandma Charity would constantly beat Uncle Ike, my Grandma Opie, and their other siblings, right there in the field, usually because she thought they weren’t working fast enough.
Rosa: Now I'll tell you the exact word he told me, he said "that was the meanest old heifer I ever seen."
That’s my cousin, Rosa Lee Pugh-Moore, Uncle Ike’s daughter. She has few memories of her father talking about his grandmother Charity. But she says whenever he did talk about her, he always had one thing to say.
Rosa: He hated his grandma, said she was just really mean. And that's all he talked about. How mean she was and how people tried to get over on her doing things she didn't like them to do, and she would fight.
I’d heard so much about Cousin Rosa - a real Pugh matriarch. In 2018 I headed to Birmingham, Alabama to meet my sweet cousin for what I thought would be a conversation with just the two of us. I didn’t realize it was her birthday, and when I arrived, it was cousin Rosa, plus about 30 other relatives - her grandchildren, great grandchildren and even a newly born great-great grandchild.
Stepping into the home, I was surrounded by generations of family members - and they were just as excited as I was to hear what Cousin Rosa had to say. There was so much they hadn’t heard about her life - from walking for miles as part of the Montgomery bus boycott, to leaving the country in Georgiana for the big city in Birmingham, all the way back to the stories she’d heard about Grandma Charity.
Before I settled in, I kissed her cheek and sat in a chair next to her to hear as many of the stories of her life and our family as I could. That’s what some of the elders who weren’t reluctant to share stories used to do, she told me.
Rosa: And at night sit up and they tell us about the families and stuff like that. Pots of peanuts and sweet potatoes, stuff like that.
With the rest of the family close by, still celebrating her birthday, I can feel those stories passing through her childhood memories into my recorder. I feel so blessed to be here. And I realize she’s my gateway to the family in Alabama, because she’s called family members all over the country, and pushed them to talk with me. She was brave, never afraid to talk about Alabama, the good and the bad. And her knowledge went all the way back to Grandma Charity.
Lee Hawkins:So when, how old were you when you learned when you first learned about Grandma Charity?
Rosa: I guess. Oh, good gracious. I was about nine or ten like that. Something like that.
Cousin Rosa and I remember Uncle Ike saying that she hated white people
Uncle Ike: She hated white folk... And uh, and uh one time my daddy was fifteen and one of them told them get out or something and someone knocked them down and Grandma kicked them and she did all three of them yeah.
This is a recording of Uncle Ike from 1991, when my Dad and I sat down with him at his home in Georgiana, Alabama. It’s hard to hear, but he’s telling us about how a group of white men showed up at their house one day and tried to pull Grandma Charity out of the house to whip her, until she came out fighting.
Rosa: Yeah, that kind of stuff he told us. I don't know that whole story. I don't remember the whole story.
Rosa: So then she had that boy.
That boy is Isaac Pugh Sr. Uncle Ike’s father, Rosa’s grandfather, and my great grandfather
Rosa: And daddy say he was too light for Black people like him, and he was too dark for white people to like him. So he's kind of a loner.
As I listen to Cousin Rosa talk about Grandma Charity, I can’t help but think about the most obvious fact about her that eluded me for so much of my life – Grandma Charity was born enslaved. No one had ever told me that! No one had mentioned it. I only learned this that early morning in 2015, when I found Jesse Pugh's will.
As Cousin Rosa said, Uncle Ike hated his grandmother. But understanding that she was enslaved for the early part of her life - around 20 years - added a dimension to this supposedly “mean ol” woman. Just how learning more about my father’s experiences under Jim Crow added nuance to him as a man in my eyes. They both went through Alabama’s version of hell on earth. We model what we see and many of us adopt the rules and customs of the country we’re born into. America, before anything else, was founded on violence.
Knowing that, I felt skeptical about the way Grandma Charity was characterized for all those years in the family history. And once I discovered Jesse Pugh’s will I realized that she’d been simply pathologized – even by her own family– and that, like me with my father, my ancestors and elders didn’t know enough about the atrocities she’d experienced to be able to explain why she sometimes thought the way she did, and was the way she was. For the benefit of this project, for my family, and most of all, for Grandma Charity, I knew I had to learn more about what life was like for an enslaved Black woman in the mid-1800s, to add meaningful context to her story.
So, what did Grandma Charity endure? What laws and codes governed her life? To learn more, I started with a conversation with Daina Ramey Berry.
Dr.Berry: I am the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts and a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I call myself a scholar of the enslaved. Most of my time in the academy has been in archives, conducting research, and trying to find and tell stories like people like your Great Great Grandmother Charity.
Dr.Berry: A number of historians are skeptical about making connections between the past and the present. But if we trace the past decade by decade, year by year, we can see connections to contemporary America, and if you look at history as a foundation, the foundations that were laid are still what have built our houses, and we need to, we need to dismantle the parts of our history that need to be rewritten to be more inclusive, right?
I reached out to Daina Ramey Berry after I found records and research on Grandma Charity and her mother Laner. It was all words and numbers on a page and I needed more context. I don’t remember how I found her - I was knee deep in books and papers and articles at the time. But I wanted to understand more about what life was like for enslaved Black women.
LEE: What don't we know about Black women during history? What haven't people been able to pay attention to or, as I would believe, haven't always wanted to pay attention to?
Dr.Berry: I think the latter is really where I'd like to start because there are conferences over the years that I've attended with historians, my colleagues, and oftentimes scholars will say, well, Yes, Black women were exploited during slavery, but not that much.
Dr.Berry: And my question always is, have you tried to calculate it? How do you know it's not that much? What is not that much? When I look at narratives, I've looked at court records, I've looked at letters and diaries and all kinds of different documents, where enslaved girls and women are talking about sexual exploitation and abuse, physical and sexual abuse.
Dr.Berry: Mothers were teaching their daughters how to quote unquote protect their principal at a very young age. Young girls did not want their enslavers to know that they had their first menstrual cycle. And on the flip side, some women even bound their breasts up so that they didn't look like they were developing and they were maturing, um, into adulthood.
Dr.Berry: So there's a number of things that enslaved women and girls did to try to protect themselves from puberty and from signs of showing evidence of puberty, because they knew what that meant. On the flip side, enslavers were often hyper focused on women's menstrual cycle, and you might ask, well, why something so personal would they be so concerned with?
Dr.Berry: That often was because enslaved people were expensive to purchase. To purchase in the auction, you had to be quite wealthy, and the values of enslaved people were high. So if you could quote unquote grow your own enslaved people, or if natural reproduction, forced reproduction, i. e. rape, then you're gonna, you're gonna grow your plantation workforce without having to purchase somebody.
This practice of growing your own free labor is in my bloodline - and repeated for generations. Grandma Laner - Charity’s mother - was raped while enslaved. Grandma Charity - who was described as a light skinned woman - is the product.
Grandma Charity was also raped by a white man while she was held captive under enslavement, and Isaac Pugh Sr is the result. This is the so-called “white man” I saw as an image on Uncle Ike’s mantle when I visited in 1991. If I had just seen his picture without the history, I would never have known his mother was Black.
Dr.Berry: So enslaved women's bodies, their reproductive capabilities, their fertility was one of the most important aspects of what maintained and grew through the 19th century the institution of chattel slavery in the United States.
LEE: Which is inextricably tied to capitalism.
Dr.Berry: Yes.
LEE: Yes, and one of the most painful things that I've experienced in the course of doing this research was a conversation that I had with a genealogist who said, well, you know, um, how do we know that she was raped?
LEE: Maybe she was a mistress?
Dr.Berry: No.
Like other enslaved women, Grandmas Laner and Charity had no legal right to refuse sexual advances from their male enslavers - because they were property, nowhere near a relationship of equals. They were also often young girls.
The sexual abuse of young girls is shocking, yet this is a key part of maintaining the power dynamic during slavery. Ripping enslaved families apart made it easier for white slave owners and other men to prey on young girls. When she was about 14 years old, Grandma Charity was separated from her mother, Laner. Just a child, she had to adjust to a different plantation and community, and a new enslaver, alone.
Dr.Berry: Family separation was one of the most traumatic experiences that enslaved people went through. And it's something that they lived in day to day fear of, of being separated from their, from their parents, from their siblings, from any, any kin that they had, um, on their, in their proximity.
Dr.Berry: We've seen it from the perspective of a child remembering the wailing of their mother as they were pulled off and put on a wagon and the child is remaining and they hear their wailing cries of their mothers up until like a mile later or just until they can't hear it anymore.
Dr.Berry: There's extreme examples of, babies, infants being ripped from the mother's breast and being sold, literally, uh, breastfeeding mothers. There are also examples of fathers and sons standing on the auction block holding hands, you know, and just silently tears coming down their face because they know that after that day, after that moment, they won't, they most likely won't ever see each other again.
Dr.Berry: Um, there's other stories of mothers knowing that this, this stranger that's come to the, the property has asked me to put my son in his Sunday best and I, I've said this before, it's like that child was a child and didn't have really any clothes but a smock and their first set of clothings that they received was the clothing that they were going to put for the auction.
Dr.Berry: Another mother talked about braiding her daughter's hair for the last time and putting a ribbon in it, knowing. that she was preparing her for the auction and that she would no longer see her again. These were traumatic experiences and we find that the closeness of the families and the desire to be connected to a family was a survival mechanism for Black people.
Dr.Berry: And that even if you look at the evidence we have now in information wanted ads,and these advertisements are powerful testimony to Black genealogy from the perspective of the enslaved and formerly enslaved people searching for, I haven't seen my mother since I was two. I'm 40 years old now. You know, I remember her name was Laura. Her hair was shoulder length. She was wearing an apron and a, and a, and a long dress.
Dr.Berry: You know, those kinds of testimonies just show the strength and the impact of the desire to connect to your family, but the impact of separation still did not push them away from trying to locate and connect with their blood relatives or kin.
In trying to connect my family tree, I found so many sources of loss.
There’s the parental loss Grandma Laner experienced with Charity, knowing almost certainly the physical brutality her daughter would face once separated from her. Two generations later, Charity’s granddaughter, and my grandmother Opie, experienced the loss of her father at age nine, after seeing him blood splattered and slumped over his horse. And then my father - Opie’s son and Charity’s great grandson - lost his mother to health inequality when he was just 12 years old. These are the building blocks of a cycle of generational loss.
So when I hear Daina Ramey Berry talk about the desire to connect to your family and the impact of separation, I get it. Genealogy is like a giant DNA puzzle that stretches across time. Until you dig, you don’t learn these things. Geneticists have data that shows that Black Americans have on average 24 percent European blood in their veins. Yet, there's a denial or an unwillingness to acknowledge how prevalent and pervasive rape was. And some of this is embedded in the laws and the codes of slavery…
Dr.Berry: We need context to understand, like you said, the contemporary connections to our current bloodlines.
Dr.Berry: And that we are, that slavery was an intimate institution. We are interlaced. We are connected whether we want to be or not, but we are connected.
LEE: Thank you so much. Thank you for this magnificent work you're doing.
Dr.Berry: Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it.
[MUSIC BEAT]
Learning more about what enslaved Black women lived through deepened my love for my strong, brave matriarch, Grandma Charity. And to think she then had to live through Jim Crow apartheid.
But I wanted to drill down even more into the specific rules that she – in Greenville in the 1800s - had to live under and follow. For that, I dug up the Alabama Slave Codes of 1852, which governed every facet of Black lives. Under the slave codes, enslaved people were property, not people. The codes were used to regulate the behavior of enslaved people and ensure their subjugation by curtailing many aspects of their lives.
Note that I didn’t say that these codes only restricted the enslaved, but ALL Black people. I discovered that one widespread myth is that the Black people who weren't in bondage were FREE.
Under the slave codes, enslaved people were property, not people.
After the abolition of slavery the Black codes picked up where the slave codes ended, and restricted the freedoms of the “free”
And then there were the restrictions of Jim Crow policies.
In states like Alabama– and the many states in the North that had their own Jim Crow rules – ALL Black people lived under laws and codes, at the country, state or national level, that curtailed their physical and emotional freedom in the United States.
As Daina Ramey Berry mentioned in our conversation some of these rules still hold us in invisible bondage and shape how we live and how for some - we parent.
For more on “the rules” I spoke with Sally Hadden, a professor at Western Michigan University…
Prof.Hadden: I'm a specialist in legal and constitutional history, particularly of early America. My first book was entitled, “Slave Patrols, Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas”. And that book tracked the development of slave patrols as a legal institution from the 1600s to the 1870s.
I told Professor Hadden about my family, my white European ancestry, and the enslavement of Grandma Charity and other family members. By then, I’d studied the Slave Codes, the Black Codes, and Jim Crow, and realized that the slave codes that governed Grandma Charity’s life informed how she raised her children and grandchildren. And in many ways, the rules my dad learned while growing up under Jim Crow apartheid governed the way my parents raised me.
The whip used to punish Slave Code and Black Code violations, became the belt I often faced in the living room. But it was more than the physical. The fear of disobeying the rules added to the mental toll. Those codes also helped shape how many others– both in my family and beyond– expected me to act..it shaped the idea that I needed to stay in my place, or be punished.
Prof.Hadden: People parent the way that they experienced being a child with their own parents. It's very hard to break that cycle of parent to child. And I, I’m not a parent myself, I don’t have kids. But I see this with my brother’s children, and my sister’s children, who are all now in their 40s and have kids of their own. And it's remarkable how, to use an old phrase, how close the apple drops from the tree.
LEE: So you get it. And, and the academic term is intergenerational trauma. But I like the way you put it because, um, this is my, this was my way to show some level of graciousness to my dad when I got this history. And then for him to show me the grace of being able to go through the journey and study it with me and to say, Hey, you know what?
LEE: This should stop in our bloodline.
LEE: But one way to heal is certainly, the best way to heal, I think, is to confront it. And that's why the work that you've done is so important, because history just holds so many powerful clues, um, into how, you know, how we got to the way we are. But very few people understand the role of violence and, but the necessity in the context of the capitalism and the, you know, the system of capitalism and what we were trying to accomplish as a nation.
Prof.Hadden: A lot of people think that when they discuss slavery, what they think of is, they think of a two party relationship, a master and an enslaved person. And what I was trying to write about was, there's always a third party, and the third party is always government. It's always the state, and whether it's the, uh, at the national level, the state level, or the county level, there's this, third party.
Prof.Hadden: And the state is always the backer up of this because the state creates the laws that make it, that, that within the society of that time, legitimated the institution of slavery.
Prof.Hadden: So for the purposes of our discussion about the law, we're interested in the common law and how slave patrols were developed as legal institutions. South Carolina had the first laws on the books about, um, slave patrols and, uh, attempts by the state to control enslaved people.
LEE: So what did patrols do?
Prof.Hadden: Patrols were required by their government, either the, the local or state government or the militia, to perform surveillance and to use violence towards enslaved people. That was their job. They were responsible for going into slave cabins, to see who was there, to make sure there were no runaways.
Prof.Hadden: They looked for uh, goods that they thought slaves shouldn't have, they hunted, uh, nighttime music to its source, uh, to look for, uh, dancing groups or for religious meetings where African Americans might be in attendance.
Prof.Hadden: Their job was to effectively enforce a curfew. that would have kept every enslaved person on the farm of the master who owned them. They were effectively the government's backstop to a master to make sure that the slaves were where they were supposed to be. So they were a type of government group that used white on Black violence to achieve their ends.
The slave patrols enforced the slave codes - created by a colonial or state legislature.
Walking into the interview with Professor Hadden, I knew the Slave Codes restricted Black people’s movement, requiring written passes for travel. They forbade assembly without a white person present. It was often illegal for Black people to read or write, or for a white person to teach them to do so.
Marriage and family rights were non-existent, allowing enslavers to separate families at will. Enslaved people could not testify in court against white people; their testimonies were generally inadmissible. They were also barred from owning property, entering into contracts, or earning wages, with any income typically claimed by their enslavers. Whipping was often the punishment. In Greenville, it was usually 39 to 100 lashes for an offense. And in the case of a rebellion or insurrection, the penalty could be death.
And what was most devastating, was that I knew that some of our white family members – mainly Mastin Pugh, the man who inherited Grandma Charity from his father, Jesse – was also in charge of the enforcement of the Alabama Slave Code across Butler County. Him holding that power would have been brutal for Grandma Charity. And eventually, generations later, for me.
It made sense that my parents would be overly cautious about us kids not doing anything wrong. They policed us so the law - or those who felt empowered to police us, even without authority - wouldn’t. It all goes back to the codes and patrols.
Prof.Hadden: The very earliest laws put a requirement on ordinary individuals, uh, to have them be responsible for enforcing slave laws. The idea here was that all whites theoretically would understand that it was in their best interest to keep slaves controlled.
Prof.Hadden: Now, this kind of enforcement didn't necessarily work terribly well to ask just everybody walking around in society who's white to keep an eye on everybody who's, um, enslaved. And so, gradually, colonial legislatures switched to other systems of using patrols to say, you people are designated as individuals.
Prof.Hadden: Uh, to control slave behavior and so legislatures, um, either required the militia to carve out groups of patrollers and have them do the work or county courts turned to their tax lists and used tax lists to nominate people to serve as patrollers for three months or six months. And, and Alabama's solution was to use the militia, to have the militia be the substitute and say the militia will choose patrollers to work in rotation.
Prof.Hadden: So, the militia were ordinary people who were supposed to be self arming. That is to say, you're supposed to show up with your own, uh, rifle, your own gun, uh, with ammunition and enough shot to, um, uh, carry out orders issued by a superior commander. Um, and to do what was necessary to protect your community.
Something to highlight here: Patrolling and policing was EVERYWHERE. There was no option for Black people to escape the patroller’s whip and gun, and white men were EXPECTED to patrol - they were governmentally required to do so. There was a financial consequence if they didn’t. This was the culture and the law.
And while it may not be explicit now, we see the ways this culture of being policed versus feeling empowered to patrol plays out along racial lines.
There are countless news reports of white people calling the police on gatherings of Black people at cookouts or for watering a neighbor’s lawn. Or questioning a Black person’s right to be in a gated community - when they live there. That’s patrolling - the power of oversight.
And then you have some Black parents who continue to have “the talk” with their children, warning them of the ways to address police officers if stopped. Or telling them not to stay out after dark. Or not to gather in large groups in case it draws the wrong kind of attention. That’s self policing for preservation and to avoid white oversight.
Even though slave patrols came to an end - in theory - with the abolition of slavery, the culture remained.
Prof.Hadden: After the Civil War ends, white Southerners are afraid. There's a lot of fear about, um, the African Americans who live around them, who live in their communities, and if patrols no longer exist, um, just like slavery no longer exists, then from the perspective of white lawmakers, Who is supposed to keep African Americans in line? Who is supposed to supervise them if there are no more slave masters? What would be done to stop crime, what would be done to control African Americans?
Prof.Hadden: Southern whites in the 1860s were terrified of the possibility of race war, and they lived with that. They talked about that race war was likely to happen, and without patrols, they were sure that they would they had no way to prevent one. So the work done by patrols was divided, you could say. The work that they had done that was about surveillance, that was about stopping crime, became part of the work of police forces. Some southern cities had had police forces, but others had not, in the world when slavery still existed.
Prof.Hadden: But the other thing that happens with patrol work after 1865 is that some of the work that patrollers had done, intimidation work, becomes, uh, the, the central feature of the Ku Klux Klan, that, that's, um, that their legacy of intimidation, of, uh, race based violence, uh, very much becomes, um, part and parcel of the Klan's, um, operating uh daily operational activities. Um, the Ku Klux Klan wanted to scare African Americans in the Reconstruction South into doing what the white community wanted. They wanted African Americans to only do agricultural work, not to have schools, not to have guns, not to vote, not to organize, not to demand um, appropriate wages, and the Klan used violence or the threat of violence to get African Americans to do what they want, what they wanted, which was all of those things.
This form of control remains, but as we’ve talked about throughout the series, it’s fear based. The whip controlled the enslaved. Scare tactics and violence were used by the Ku Klux Klan. And today, corporal punishment - the threat and the practice - is still perceived by some as a way to keep children safe.
LEE: Can you tell us about the differences and similarities between the violence of the slave patrols and corporal punishment that we see in modern times in homes and schools?
Prof.Hadden: Well, the, the use of violence usually has one object in mind to get obedience, to get control. And so there's, there's the root of the similarity is if, if corporal punishment or violence has an objective of to get to control, then they spring from the same kinds of beginnings. Now, there are some key differences, obviously. Um, control as a parent might be for an immediate and a transient reason.
Prof.Hadden: Um, you know, a mother spanks a child to reinforce the idea in the child's mind that it's a bad idea to go out and chase a ball onto a road where there are lots of cars. Um, I speak on, from personal experience on that one, Lee. Um, having been on the receiving end of my mother's hand when I chased a ball out into the street.
Prof.Hadden: I think she probably lost a few years off of her life watching that happen, but she wanted to make sure that I got the message as a preschooler that I shouldn't do that again. Believe me, I remember it firmly. But control can also be about long term domination. And that's different. Um, an abusive parent that beats a child every weekend for no reason, just to reinforce the idea that the parent is bigger, um, badder, a bully, an abuser.
Prof.Hadden: Um, you know, the very threat of violence can almost be as intimidating as the actual use of violence in that sort of situation. Um, an abusive father. puts his hand on his belt and the child doesn't have to see anything more because the connection between the belt and its use on them is there. as an instrument of corporal punishment is very live.
Prof.Hadden: It's nearly as terrifying that the belt itself is almost as terrifying as, as seeing it in use. Now, of course, there are several large differences between what patrols did and the kind of, corporal punishment or violence one might experience in a home or in a school. One of the biggest is that when a patroller used, um, a rod or a whip against an enslaved person, they could be strangers to each other.
Prof.Hadden: That is to say, they might be, the patrol member might not know who the enslaved person was. The enslaved person might never have laid eyes on that patroller before that night. Um, uh, a second difference obviously is, is the racial one. That is to say, patroller is white and the enslaved person is Black. And within the family or within a school, that sort of distinction, both of those distinctions are missing.
Prof.Hadden: They're not strangers to each other. They're maybe share the same race as each other. And there are also differences of expectation. Um, we expect, or at least society teaches us to expect, kindness from our family members, from our teachers, that we're going to be nurtured or supported by them. But that may or may not be the case.
Prof.Hadden: Whereas, I don't think enslaved people ever thought that they'd see the milk of human kindness coming from a patroller. So they're bearing those differences in mind. There are some similarities, and one of the similarities is the use of an instrument of violence. whether it be a belt or a whip or a rod, um, certainly the instrument by which punishment is inflicted might look very much the same.
LEE: Yeah. And you touched on kindness and the expectation of kindness. When I was a kid, I didn't expect kindness from my parents, and the reason was, I did receive kindness from my parents, but I also received the brutality of violence, and in my community, it was stressed to me that violence was kindness, because we're protecting you from the evils of the world, we're protecting you, we're scaring you so that when you go out, you know how to act right, When you're at the mall with your friends so you don't get killed by the police or accused of stealing something you didn't steal or decide to steal something and get arrested and in the process of getting arrested, get killed or join a gang because you're, you're not being disciplined and then get killed on the streets.
LEE: And so we're doing this because we have to do this, because the society will kill you if we don't do this, if we don't instill this fear in you. And so it was a very mentally, it was a very, um, hard thing to process as a kid, because I just fundamentally did have that understanding that as a Black kid, there were a different set of rules for me.
We talked alot about how concepts and ideas are handed down through generations.
Prof.Hadden: But I can tell you that in the early 20th century, um, there was tremendous fear. Again, we're back to a period of fear in American society and fear motivates people to do very strange and dangerous things. And one of the things they were afraid of was the massive influx of immigrants that were coming to America from Southern Europe.
Prof.Hadden: Um, this was a time when, um, immigration numbers were going through the roof, nationally, and there's a backlash to that. And for some people, that backlash takes the form of joining, um, uh, political organizations, and sometimes it takes the form of joining a group like the Klan, uh, to demonstrate white supremacy against these perceived outsiders. But it's also just as much about in the 20s, you begin to see the migration, the out migration, of a large number of African Americans from the South to other parts of the country. Um, this is something that had, obviously started in the 1860s and 70s, but it accelerates in the early 20th century, and, um, people moving to Detroit, people moving to Cleveland, people moving to, um, uh, St. Louis, moving to loads of cities where there were industrial opportunities.
Prof.Hadden: Um, many of those individuals, African American individuals, moved during, uh, World War I in the late 19 teens. And what this did, it changed the, uh, population complexion of a lot of previous cities that had previously had, um, very large, uh, white, um, populations to being ones that were more racially mixed, where before more than three quarters of the African American population lived in the American South.
Prof.Hadden: When you move into the 20th century, this outward migration of African Americans to other parts of the United States meant that, in other communities, a lot of whites begin to experience fear, fear of the unknown.
And that concept – the fear of the unknown – also applied to my family and my own community. My father’s family moved from Alabama to Minnesota, but those fears of Jim Crow remained.
I thought back to my interview with my mother, in which she told me, “we didn’t know if something could happen to you, because things have happened.”
For Black parents who used the belt to keep their children in their perceived place – or even for Black people who called other Black people “acting white” for excelling in school or having friends of other races – they were paralyzed by that generational fear, which, if you really sit down and read them, are the same attitudes that the Slave Code is rooted in.
Prof.Hadden: Um, you know, violence. is something that is passed down just like a family name. And it starts with knowing our history, but then it takes action. And that kind of action, I think, is up to each individual. It can't, you can't wait around for government to do it.
It's up to the individual to act and to try to make a change. That's my own personal view.
LEE: Okay. Incredible. Thank you, Professor Hadden.
Prof.Hadden: You're so welcome, Lee.
My research into Grandma Charity's life under the brutal rule of Mastin Pugh and the Alabama Slave Code of 1852, led me to confront a painful question: When my father whipped me with that belt, hoping to mold me into an exceptionally productive Black boy who had to grow up too fast, who was really whipping me? Was it Lee Roy Hawkins Sr., the strong, omnipresent Black father who, drawing on the power of our irrepressible Black village, wanted me to achieve our wildest dreams?
Or was it Lee Roy Hawkins Sr., the great-grandson of a Black woman enslaved by Mastin Pugh, driven by the white supremacist DNA in his veins, believing he had no other choice?
For me, one of the biggest challenges was accepting that both could be true. As Americans, the same complexity that inspires and haunts the American family hung over my father and our family for generations.
To confront this generational tragedy, I had to peel back the layers of truth about the origins of this country and our family's place in it. For only then did I truly understand why so much of my upbringing was defined by rules enforced by the whip, which, for generations, was meant to keep us enslaved.
In facing this undeniable American history, I hope that I helped position us to reclaim my family’s power and to rewrite our narrative, transforming the pain inherited from “mean ol’ Grandma Charity” into a legacy of resilience, and, most importantly, liberation.
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CREDITS
What Happened In Alabama is a production of American Public Media. It’s written, produced and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins.
Our executive producer is Erica Kraus.
Our senior producer is Kyana Moghadam.
Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga.
Our lead writer is Jessica Kariisa.
Our producers are Marcel Malekebu and Jessica Kariisa.
This episode was sound designed and mixed by Marcel Malekebu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronen Lando.
Our fact checker is Erika Janik.
And Nick Ryan is our director of operations.
Special thanks to the O’Brien Fellowship for Public Service Journalism at Marquette University; Dave Umhoefer, John Leuzzi, Andrew Amouzou and Ziyang Fu. And also thanks to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short.
The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati.
You can follow us on our website, whathappenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM Studios.
Thank you for listening.