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**Disclaimer: The names of the real life people who fell victim to these heinous crimes have been omitted to protect the innocent and the privacy of people who would rather not have their lives re-opened to the atrocities of the past.
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This is part two of my black history assignment. I don’t know if any anyone decided to take me up on my quest for personal history, but I must admit this journey has been very enlightening to me.
I have known about the Dial family in Sumter Co. Alabama for a short time. They were part of the old southern guard that owned a large amount of acreage in western Alabama and eastern Mississippi. They owned property in Sumter, Boyd, and York, Alabama where my father’s family was raised until the moved to Birmingham when he was about 6 or 7.
With all this acreage it is no wonder that the Dial family chose to break their land into parcels for sharecropping. There is nothing special about this act. Many of us are aware that for almost a whole century after the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the southern states continued many of the institutions that created a slave state under the guise of work choice.
When the slaves were set free; very few had marketable skills that would allow them to work independently of the whites who owned them. Most were farmers or domestics and with the South in such a state of disrepair and financial distress many of the whites who once had a house full of servants were forced to let go of their help and divide parcels of their farms or plantations amongst those former slaves that choose to stay.
The lucky freedmen and women were able to travel North or West to seek their fortune with the skills they possessed, but the vast majority were stuck in a system that took advantage of their lack of education and marketable skills; thus creating a pseudo slave labor force under the guise of mutual cooperation.
However, because many of the former slaves guarded their freedom closely; they chose to live their lives on a delicate tight rope which balanced their desire to create family life, be productive citizens and the need to avoid many of the harsh penalties their second class citizenship could inflict. This brings us to a landmark case not many of us know about in America.
Fred, Oscar and Robert Jeff Dial versus the United States of America
In 1867 the US Congress passed the Anti-Peonage Act (13th Amendment) which prevented slavery in the US. This act banned any kind of forced servitude and made it a federal crime to keep or create slaves. By the early 1950’s it had only been successfully prosecuted ten times. Then, in 1953, came the Dials.
Robert Jeff Dial was the patriarch of the family and owned the land on which my father’s parents sharecropped. It is a well known, yet a not widely talked about fact that this man would “borrow” the children from his sharecropper’s families (for reasons undisclosed) and keep them at his big house. It is speculated that these children were put to work in the Dial household as payment for some “debt” the family couldn’t afford. Some of these children were lured away from their homes with promises of fruit or candy only to find that their true purpose was to be bound into slavery. (See The Damned)
My father was not one of these children but he knew a young man who was. It was made clear to me that this man (now in his mid 70’s) would not be open to discussing what he saw, heard or was required to do when he was with the Dials and it is assumed that he witnessed at least some of the atrocities perpetuated by this family.
The Atrocities
In addition to “borrowing” children, the Dials had a long history of bonding out Black men who had been put in jail for some minor infraction and forcing these men to work off their “debt” until the Dials deemed it paid. Very few of these men made it out alive and it was widely known that many of the men who tried to leave were lynched, burned alive or drowned.
Once the Dials got a man it was very unlikely he would make it home alive. My father relayed a story to me in which a man, after being held for several months, decided he had worked off his bond and should be free to go. Mr. Dial’s response was a stake through the man’s abdomen pinning him to the ground and then telling the man “Nigger if you can get up then you are free.”
Imagine being pinned to the ground, dying a slow and painful death and the last words you hear on this earth is a sick joke laughed at by the very people who held you captive. There were stories of men being drowned alive in cisterns or burned at the stake. This was in the early 1950’s. This is one story and there is no clear estimate on how many other men lost their lives in a similar fashion.
In 1952, a young man was bonded out by the Dials and driven to their property near Boyd, AL. Shortly thereafter the young man, after attempting to leave, was tied to a bale of hay beat to death with a lariat. When the man’s body was returned to his mother she was told that his cause of death was pneumonia. This mother seeing the bruising and the horrific condition of he sons body contacted the local FBI office and requested an investigation to her son’s death. This investigation leads them to Robert Jeff, Fred, Oscar and several relatives in eastern Mississippi.
While investigating Robert Jeff it is said that the undercover FBI agent was given a tour of the “farm” and led to the place where many of the black men were killed and/or buried. In rural Alabama at the time, it was not seen as a crime to enslave, to rape, kill or torture black people. This is just how life was and many whites of the time bragged about their exploits to other sympathetic whites. It was common knowledge.
It is rumored that upon discovering the “friend” was actually an FBI agent Robert Jeff Dial decided that poison was better than going to jail for murder of a black person and after two tries he successfully succeeded in taking the poison that caused his death. The family lore says that on the day the elder Dial, died a horrific storm washed out the roads leading to his house. The storm downed trees and made it impossible for the mortuary to get a car to the house to remove the body. After two days two teams of horses were called in to pull the body down the road by wagon. There are those who believe even hell didn’t want this man.
Although Robert Jeff avoided prosecution Fred and Oscar were not quite so fortunate. US States Attorney Frank Johnson (see page 75 &76) tried the case that sought to convict the Dial brothers of peonage. His argument won him the case and the Dial brothers were sentenced to 18 months in a Federal prison for peonage. There were never any murder charges filed and these men died of old age.
To this day if you travel to York, AL the Dial families are still members of this rural community with their very own street named after them.
The more things change… The more they stay the same.
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These two posts on my African American History have been inspired by Henry Louis Gates African American lives 1 & 2. I hope that in learning a little more about me you all are inspired to dig through your family’s past and find out the things that make you who you are. It is important that we as Black people remember that our lives are the sum total of all the experiences of everyone in our family. What we do and experience now shapes the lives of our children for generations to come. We are doomed to repeat our communal failures and likely to lose our triumphs to time if we do not own the whole of who we are as a people.
Thank you for hanging out with me for this journey through my past!
