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Tuscaloosa News
State's larger mining accident claimed 128 men 100 years ago
The Banner Coal Mine was owned by Pratt Consolidated Coal Co., operated mostly by prisoners leased to the company by state and county governments. Most of the workers at Banner Mine were black prisoners leased to the mining company.
In 1911, April 8 was a rainy Saturday in the northwest Jefferson County town of Littleton.
<!--articlepicture2.pbo-->The morning shift had started at Banner Mine, most of the coal miners coming from the nearby prison camp, when an explosion occurred at 6:30 a.m.
For 128 men, almost all of them prisoners of the state and many of them serving time for minor offenses, it was the day they were effectively sentenced to death.
“It was an awful experience, believe me, an awful experience,” James Franklin, a survivor of the explosion at Banner Mine that day, told The Birmingham News in the days after the accident.
Still the worst mining accident in Alabama history, the explosion at the Banner Mine 100 years ago today was en epic tragedy not only because 128 miners died, but because the accident, horrific as it was, did little to change the state's practice of selling convicts into hard — sometimes deadly — labor.
“They paid for their crime not only with their works and imprisonment, but also with their life,” read an editorial in The Tuscaloosa News from April 12, 1911. “That such a thing should happen is a blot on justice. The whole thing goes to show the utter wretchedness of our convict laws and demands that in the name of right and humanity they be revised.”
Leasing convicts
Historians Robert Ward and William Rogers plead in their 1987 book, “Convicts, Coal and the Banner Mine Tragedy,” that the explosion be “remembered as something more than a fleeting event on a vast and teeming stage,” yet its effect was only an incremental change in mine safety laws.
Despite calls from progressives in the state in the aftermath of the accident, the convict-lease system remained until 1928 in Alabama, and, in fact, the Banner Mine became the sole mine for state prisoners less than a year after the explosion.
“The economic interests involved could not be overridden even by the shock of the Banner explosion,” writes Ward, now deceased, in an entry of the online Encyclopedia of Alabama.
Mining accidents were almost commonplace in the state during the era. In the six years before the Banner explosion, there were mining accidents that killed 18, 39, 57, 89 and 112 at a time. Just three days before the Banner explosion, two black convicts died from lack of oxygen in the mines, writes Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Blackmon in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Slavery by Another Name.”
“Everywhere in the slave mines of Birmingham was death,” Blackmon wrote in his 2008 book. “Hardly any week passed when on or more dead black corpses weren't dragged up from inside the earth, heaped atop the mounds of coal in the railcars, or found dead in the simple infirmaries of a prison.”
Mining companies such as Pratt Consolidated Coal Co. that owned Banner Mine derived too much benefit from cheap workers who couldn't form unions or protest working conditions, and state leaders and county sheriffs were addicted to the money they raked in from rounding up men, mostly black, on trivial crimes and selling them to the highest bidder, Blackmon writes.
Of the 122 prisoners killed at Banner Mine, all but five were black. Nearly a third were serving sentences of 20 days or less for misdemeanors such as violating prohibition and vagrancy, writes retired Auburn University professor Wayne Flynt in his book, “Alabama in the Twentieth Century.”
“The mangled, charred bodies removed from Banner Mine were a terrible price to pay for such trifling offenses,” Flynt writes.
A deadly day
It's not clear exactly what happened in the mine that day. The explosion occurred at 6:30 a.m., just after the morning shift was shuffled into the mine from the adjacent prison camp. It's likely that a white prisoner, John Wright, serving time for assault and battery, ignited gas in the air by accidentally bringing two wires together for a spark, write Ward and Rogers.
The explosion directly killed about seven men, including the free workers, and knocked out a ventilation fan. The rest of the men died from suffocation, breathing in black damp — an oxygenless gas of nitrogen and carbon dioxide.
Franklin and fellow convict Clarence Nicholson managed to burrow their way out of the rubble with a pick ax, despite describing to The Birmingham News a feeling of black damp upon them. They were two of perhaps 40 men who managed to escape the gas.
The explosion sapped all the oxygen and left the black damp in its wake, but it's plausible that, without the fan, gases built up in the mine, since Banner was known to be gassy. The latter explanation never received full attention at the time because it would have meant the company was negligent, write Rogers and Ward.
In fact, Pratt Consolidated Coal Co. won many of the civil cases filed against it and most of the rest were dismissed. In a handful of cases, the company paid victims' families $300 or less, Rogers and Ward write.
The day before the explosion, the Alabama Legislature adjourned its session having failed to pass a bill that would bar leasing convicts to private companies, sending them instead to state road work, a much-needed task in the era of the emerging automobile.
But opposition was stiff, and Rep. Fleetwood Rice of Tuscaloosa defended the practice of leasing prisoners to mines, according to Ward and Rogers.
“Thousands of good men work in mines, and I can see no reason why murderers should not do so,” Rice told fellow legislators. “The convicts are lawbreakers and we send them to work out their sentences. There are far more accidents on the face of the earth than in the mines. This is all sentiment.”
In the days after the explosion, most bodies pulled from Banner Mine were buried in a trench in the convict cemetery near the mine. Less than two weeks after the explosion, more prisoners were hauled in to work at Banner Mine.
