Piece today appearing in the Wall Street Journal, beginning at page 1, Col. 1. Sorry I do not subscribe to the online service and cannot provide a clickie.

Being only a very moderate "leftie," I had not taken too tragically the accounts of convict labor in post civil war South. This sets me straight.

The story describes in great detail, from contemporary documents, the use of leased convict labor in coal mines. As in "Cold Creek Rebellion," only in Alabama, not Tennessee. As perpetrated by United States Steel, apparently in violation of instructions by Judge Gary after they purchased a mine from Tennessee Coal around 1910.

Leasing convicts being lucrative and a source of revenue to the state, blacks were arrested and convicted of extremely minor offenses, and then made to serve long terms to pay off the cost of their arrest and conviction. Conditions of confinement are described in chilling detail. I won't describe them here, except that the best you can say about them is that they probably compare favorably to some of the worse Nazi concentration camps. No sanitation, and a low survival rate. Employers granted the privilege of flogging or even shooting convicts. Large fields of unmarked graves. Workers kept underground for months.

One's impression from the article is that there was probably nothing quite that bad elsewhere in the South, because most of the mining and industry were in Alabama. Of course, no one has researched the rest of the South.

U.S. Steel has responded that it "was a positive player in this history . . . was a force for good."