“Beg pardon. Are you a railroad man?”
“In a way,” I replied.
“Can you direct me to the round-house?”
“No. What is the matter, want a place to sleep?”
“That is just it. Here is my union card. I happened to hit town broke. Don’t know a soul, and don’t know any of the boys. I know I could spend the night at the round-house, if I could find it.”
Even here the jail denied shelter and the Salvation Army had nothing to offer a penniless man. I felt my going to Birmingham was at an opportune time as the Alabama Federation of Women’s Clubs was in convention, and a beautiful, gracious lady, their State President, Mrs. Ferris Columan, kindly granted me a hearing. When I left I was conscious of the fact that I left a thought which would be carried to a great many of the kind hearts of Alabama.
I went on down to Mobile, then to New Orleans. Wherever I went, all through the South, I heard the cry in the night of cruel abuse and neglect of the wage-slave just as I heard it all through the North. I saw the blood drops of the peon, the broken, bruised and lacerated bodies of human beings leased from the prison to the convict camp. I heard the unceasing cry of woe from stone walls and iron bars, the mad shrieks from dungeon cells and torture chambers and the terror-striking bay of the bloodhound.
While what I have written of will remain an incurable wound, when I carried the message of progress, of justice and love, a plea for an institution for labor, for health, and for brotherly care, into the labor councils, the progressive Business Men’s Union, composed of three hundred citizens, and the Women’s Clubs (especially the Era Club), the intense interest shown by all of these for the oppressed heralds an illumined page in history and bespeaks a glorious victory for the South.