The Saga of Branch Alley ... ‘Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. “By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites ... Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace—often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments ...” Slavery By Another Name Douglas A. Blackmon
By Joseph G. Anthony
T
he Lexington Leader was a brand-new newspaper in 1888 when its reporter visited a Lexington neighborhood known as Branch Alley, part of Ayres Alley, across from East Main Street. It would be more than a decade before Union Station would be erected directly across from it. Town Branch was open to the sky there, then, or as the Leader put it, Town Branch “rolled slimily and turgidly through the delectable neighborhood… a stream of almost living filth” (Lexington Leader, 10/13/1888). The
Leader reporter, in 1888, was indignant for the residents. Why should the city’s 30,000 residents direct all their sewage into one place? “Have the people on the street no legal remedy? … Something must be done, and that before the heat of another summer comes.” Twenty-six summers would come and go before something would be done. But that something wouldn’t help the residents of Branch Alley. The attitude towards the alley’s inhabitants had changed somewhat. The sewage and filth still traveled to its street Spring 2021
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