One Woman’s Complicity

— By Frances V. Moulder

“I took this photo in 1918, when I was about your age,” my mother said to me when I was eight years old. She showed me a yellowed photo of a very large house, a mansion, in Knoxville, Tennessee. “I took it with a Brownie camera my father had given me for Christmas. Our family lived there; it was my grandmother’s house.” She pointed out some ribbons tied on the trees and told me they were for the soldiers in World War I. I contemplated the fancy Victorian house, quite a contrast to the small, 1920’s bungalow in which I was growing up. Sensing my surprise, my mother added, “One day I’ll tell you the whole story.”

518 W. Cumberland, Knoxville, TN Copyright Rebecca Hunt Moulder

The whole story is that my great grandmother, Rebecca O’Conner Hunt, was complicit in the late 19th century in Tennessee’s convict leasing system, called “slavery by another name.” After the Civil War, Southern states leased their prisoners, mostly Black, to private entrepreneurs who wanted cheap labor to replace what enslaved people had once done for free. The leased convicts had been arrested for petty crimes or trumped-up charges, the Jim Crow version of driving while Black. Rebecca’s brother, Thomas O’Conner, held the first and second leases with the state, putting convicts to work in coal mines, coke ovens, railroad building, and other enterprises. He became very wealthy as a result, and shared that wealth with his sister.

Rebecca Roberts O’Conner, circa 1865, age 26. From a carte de visite made by photographer Scheier in Knoxville, Tennessee

In the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company mines at Tracy City, the prisoners worked twelve-hour days, crawling in mine shafts and swinging pick axes. Work was organized like forced labor on antebellum plantations. Each person was assigned a “task” of digging out as much as two-thirds of a ton of coal a day. Guards whipped anyone who did not make his goal. Many convicts died from accidents, illnesses, and others desperately tried to escape. Disease was rampant due to crowding and poor sanitation; the men slept in their dirty clothes, caked in dust and dirt from the mines.

My great grandmother married a man who worked for the company, and they lived in Tracy City for several years. She had servants in her home who were convicts, probably women who were spared assignment to the mines. Rebecca joked with the family that she preferred having murderers as servants because they wouldn’t steal the silver. I imagine that these women prisoners cooked and cleaned and cared for my grandfather, while Rebecca tended to the family’s business and social affairs. While Thomas was killed in his forties, in a gun battle with two other businessmen, Rebecca lived into her seventies, comfortable in a Victorian mansion in Knoxville that Thomas had built for her. This was the house my mother lived in and photographed when she was eight.

Guards with escaped convict, Tracy City Branch Prison. From the Collections of William Ray Turner and Son. The convict is in the front row, sitting on the ground.

The State required leaseholders to keep detailed records on the prisoners, including name, race, physical features, crime, sentence, date of entry, date of release, escape or death. There were thousands of prisoners named in the Tracy City records; four hundred or more prisoners were held in the stockade every year for twenty-six years. I am troubled that no one has chronicled the lives of these individuals, who were so poorly treated, while my great grandmother and her brother have gone down in history books as among the so-called “first families” of Knoxville.

I am volunteering with the Convict Leasing Project, located at Sewanee: the University of the South, which is working to reveal what is known about the convicts. The project, led by Dr. Camille Westmont, is transcribing the prison records, and excavating the stockade site. It hopes to establish a memorial there to educate the public about the history of convict leasing, and the crimes committed against humanity by those who were involved. The project is part of the University’s Roberson Project on Slavery, Race and Reconciliation, which seeks to tell the truth about the university’s history of involvement with slavery and the forms of oppression that continued after Emancipation.

Years after my mother showed me the photo of Rebecca’s mansion, she wrote a biography of Thomas O’Conner, from which I learned many details about my O’Conner ancestors. (“May the Sod Rest Lightly, 1977) But my mother did not tell the whole story. While she discussed the convict leasing, she overlooked the fact that people like me descended from people like Rebecca and her brother, Thomas O’Conner, have had privileged lives based in part on money and social capital derived from our ancestors’ crimes against humanity. While I did not inherit any money from the O’Conner stolen assets, since my grandfather James O’Conner Hunt was alcoholic and whatever capital was passed on to him did not survive his lifestyle, I did inherit social capital – the intangible things that help people get ahead, such as education, social status, language, family networks. My grandfather sent my mother to two years of college before the Depression upended her aspirations. She passed on to me the expectation to go to college, and my college education has enabled me to live a middle class life.

When transcribing the convicts’ names, I imagine they must have hoped that one day justice would be done. Currently, a national conversation is going on about reparations. Should we as a nation acknowledge the harm done to African Americans by our nation’s history of injustice, and establish programs to eliminate the wealth gap between African Americans and whites? Bills in both the House and Senate propose a national commission to study the question and propose policy. I feel it is especially important to share my family’s “whole story” at this historic moment.

NOTE: When this story was first posted, Frances mistakenly included a photo of Thomas O’Conner’s house instead of Rebecca O’Conner’s house. The correct photo has now been substituted. The houses look similar and are easy to mix up, but Frances fortunately discovered the error as her research continued. The new photo was taken from a memoir by her mother, Rebecca Hunt Moulder, “Right in the Middle of the Sidewalk.” (unpublished manuscript in her possession)

Author: Frances V. Moulder is a sociologist, writer, teacher, and an activist for social justice. She has a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University and a B.A. in sociology-anthropology from Wagner College. Her most recent book is Exiting the Extraordinary: Returning to the Ordinary World After War, Prison and Other Extraordinary Experiences (Lexington Books, 2017). Other works include Japan, China and the Modern World Economy: Toward a Reinterpretation of East Asian Development, and Social Problems of the Modern World: a Reader. She is currently researching her family history in the South for a close up view of how White families in the United States have accumulated wealth through slavery, convict leasing, and other forms of systemic racism.