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Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II | 
 enlarge | Author: Douglas A. Blackmon
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $19.77
You Save: $10.18 (34%)
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Rating:  41 reviews
Sales Rank: 1762
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 480
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.5 x 1.7
ISBN: 0385506252
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.896073
EAN: 9780385506250
ASIN: 0385506252
Publication Date: March 25, 2008
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Product Description
In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—an “Age of Neoslavery” that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.
Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of “free” black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.
The neoslavery system exploited legal loopholes and federal policies that discouraged prosecution of whites for continuing to hold black workers against their wills. As it poured millions of dollars into southern government treasuries, the new slavery also became a key instrument in the terrorization of African Americans seeking full participation in the U.S. political system.
Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Slavery by Another Name unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II.
Slavery by Another Name is a moving, sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 36 more reviews...
Another Missing Chapter in American History May 12, 2008
Herbert L Calhoun (Falls Church, VA USA)
60 out of 69 found this review helpful
This book is both profoundly factual, and at times, partially "un-factual," -- that is, reconstructed history. In instances where the ex-slaves could not speak for themselves, which were many, Mr. Blackmon deigns to speak for them himself. It is what can only be called "necessary historical extrapolation, in defense of the defenseless." Yet, somehow these noble stretches beyond the data do indeed conform to and confirm the same stories and results researched equally well by William B. Taylor in his "Down on Parchman Farm: The Great Prison in the Mississippi Delta," which covers the same period as this book does, but primarily from the Mississippi point of view rather than from Alabama's.
Altogether Blackmon taps into another important, under-reported yet very dark part of American history: The period of the Southern White "Redemption," after the freedman's Bureau had closed its tents down (literally) and moved back North, leaving the ex-slaves to fend for themselves for the next 100 years.
The most cold-blooded of the truths that he reveals is that the shaky white farms and plantations that managed to revive themselves in the aftermath of the Civil War, simply could not make it without black expertise. And here he does not mean just black manual labor, but more importantly, black farming and household management skills. As a result, of this white deficiency, and as is usual for the U.S. when it comes to race relations, the Southerners sought to re-enslave and re-colonize blacks by more novel and more interesting but equally brutal means: that is by legal and social fiat.
In almost every instance, these tactics had a patina of legalisms pasted over them (and the author spends too much time examining them and churning them trying it seems to treat them as if they were legitimate defenses of all but indefensible practices) the overall effect was the same: that "Blacks had no legal protections whatsoever." Going through the legal motions was only a pretext for whites to continue doing what they had done during slavery and had planned to continue doing by any means necessary anyway, in order to continue "keeping blacks down" and re-enslaved.
While the book makes it seem that these tactic and stratagems for re-enslavement occurred only due to Southern industrial and domestic exigencies, hatred and mean-spirited chicanery, the author must be reminded that the brutal "Black Code Laws" upon which many of these pernicious Southern practices were patterned, began in the North before the Civil War, and were simply grafted on to the "redeemed southern way of life" as the new "Jim Crow" laws and practices.
I would have been much happier if the author had made an attempt to show the "all but linear (and very stable) connection" across time between the arrest and incarceration rates then -- which in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama and Florida, constantly hovered around 25% -- and the almost exact NATIONAL rates today. This in my view (as well as that of a handful of sociologists) could not be only a mere coincident, but more likely due to deep structure social reasons and causes that did indeed grow out of America's culture of "structural racism," which inevitably, one way or another, gets mapped back to slavery.
The reasons for incarcerations then and now, are, of course different: Then, as the author so carefully elaborates, blacks were picked up and thrown in jail on almost any pretext whatsoever - from vagrancy to stealing a can of beans. Then, it was a conscious case of "coerced labor," pure and simple. Today it is due mostly to the Draconian and unfair 100 to 1 cocaine laws, and a host of other, mostly unconscious "race related social causes." The utter stability of these percentages in themselves, represents an untold story laying dormant in the subtext of American culture, all to itself.
Any excavation of American history this good, even with some limitations, cannot get less than five stars.
Historic Achievement Toward Greater Insight and Reconciliation March 29, 2008
ellison
33 out of 37 found this review helpful
In what may well be one of the most important works in non-fiction to emerge in the 21st Century, investigative journalist, Douglas Blackmon, has authored a compelling and compassionate examination of slavery's evolution, practice and influence reaching far into the 20th Century. Blackmon's, Slavery by Another Name, is certainly a prizeworthy study by a writer whose acumen for the highest in journalistic standards combined with an unusual gift for storytelling makes this historic work both enlightening and inspiring.
As an African American (bi-racial Black/White) I can attest to the facts and stories Mr. Blackmon presents, as told to me by my father who only upon his deathbed, felt safe enough to reveal. Growing up in Jasper Texas in the 1920's, he was picking cotton at age 7 and driving tractors at age 9. The atmosphere for Blacks was a living holocaust, where my father witnessed the lynching of his boyhood friend at age 13, where oppression was a daily experience for Blacks; even in the most simple terms of human interaction, where making eye-contact when addressing Whites was considered untenable and subject to harsh retribution.
Indeed, Mr. Blackmon goes far beyond these traditional understandings of racial practices, and brings new, deeper knowledge of how slavery had merely been retooled to accommodate the unforeseen realities of emancipation, allowing it to flourish for many more decades in what Blackmon calls the "Age of Neoslavery".
Resulting from the recent history-making speech on race by Presidential hopeful, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, there is huge public interest in reaching a more comprehensive understanding of race relations in our nation. The fact is, public response to Sen. Obama's speech has uncapped an overwhelming outpouring of public interest, writings, and dialogue.
Mr. Blackmon had a similar experience back in 2001, when his article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on how U.S. Steel Corp. relied on the forced labor of Blacks. This too received massive public response expressing appreciation and sincere interest to learn more. Hence, after 7 years of exhaustive research and interviews, Slavery by Another Name arrives at a time our nation, facing a historic general election, is contemplating race as never before. And Mr. Blackmon's pioneering work is helping us to break new ground toward a path of greater insight and reconciliation.
- Ellison Horne
A Must Read April 5, 2008
Polycarp Johnson (Chicago, IL USA)
22 out of 26 found this review helpful
In 1932 two movies came out of Hollywood:
Paul Muni in "I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang"
and
Richard Barthelmess (also Bette Davis as a blond): "Cabin in the Cotton".
After the Production Code, fomented by the Catholic Church, gained bite even these stories --- less than half-truths though they were -- disappeared as Hollywood followed the revisionist money-making pseudo-history of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" with "Jezebel" and "Gone with the Wind" (to name only the best known) --- plangant melodramas of the "cavalier culture" of the "Old South."
It has been that revisionist history that has indoctrinated millions of Americans and millions of others throughout the world.
Now, to paraphrase Ms. Davis in "Jezebel": "It's 2008, pumkin! 2008!!" and Douglas Blackmon, the Wall Street Journal's Alanta Bureau Chief (who would have supposed? -- well, their news reporting has always far outshined their editorial page, Mr. Murdoch) at last pulls back the veil.
Read it and, if you have one ounce of humanity, you will weep, perhaps literally.
You will realize that those old "critical" films ("I Am a Fugitive" and Muni were nominated for Academy Awards -- they both lost; Ms. Davis won for "Jezebel" and you know about "Gone with...") actually hid the most bitter truth of the situation. You may also understand why many African Americans are bitter and angry.
This book, although not written by a professional historian, is well researched, thoroughly documented (to the extent documentation was not destroyed or buried, like the graves of the "leased" laborers), and engagingly written. Most important, Mr. Blackmon does not stop with a mere description of the brutal system of "convict" leasing which permeated Southern industry until World War II. He relates it to the entire system of repression, oppression, and degredation of African Americans - Jim Crow, lynching (averging one every ten days from 1880 to 1940), and corruption - and the legal, political, and public denial of the same - which permeated U.S. culture at the time -- and continues to this day.
If you are like me, you will not be able to read this book in one sitting. It is too gut-wrenching --- whether you are white or black.
Nevertheless, it will be one of the most important books you will ever read. Unfortunately, it will probably not sell as many copies as "Gone with the Wind" nor is it likely that even "Indy" moviemakers will put the story of Green Cottinham on film. More's the pity.
Briiliant History of the Post Civil War Enslavement of African Americans April 27, 2008
Daniel Hurley (Chesapeake, VA.)
22 out of 23 found this review helpful
Douglas Blackmon writes an incredibly detailed account of the sad history of African Americans forcibly enslaved through questionable legal means long after the Civil War by several southern States up through WWII. Using trumped up charges or minor charges with extreme penalties requiring extended jail or prison terms, blacks were incarcerated and their terms leased out to mines, farms, logging companies and a variety of industries. Due to the financial rewards gained by arresting Sheriffs, Judges and Justices of the Peace, blacks were rounded up many times on false charges to merely increase the earning of those involved. The saddest history is the extreme treatment given to prisoners leased out or whose fines were paid by the owners of industry or property who maintained the prisoners until there "time" was complete although often extended. Working in horrible conditions, long days, 6 days a week, poorly fed, poorly housed and often severely beaten; blacks died by the score and were buried in unmarked graves. Efforts to break this form of peonage was attempted in Alabama by weakly supported U.S. Attorney Reese in 1903 who actually obtained convictions yet suffered defeat with light sentences and shockingly a pardon later by President "TR" Roosevelt. Although Roosevelt made attempts at Civil Rights, he seemed bridled by States rights over Federal and apparently political considerations. The period was particularly violent toward blacks as noted my numerous lynchings and murders of black men not just in the Deep South but also not far from Springfield, Illinois. It is also quite startling that even companies such as U.S. Steel, that expanded into the south, allowed companies they purchase to continue this form of slave labor. What is particularly abhorrent was the gross mistreatment of prisoners and killings of helpless prisoners indicative of the fact that these men, and enslaved women, were considered less than slaves, as if they had no value primarily because they could be easily replaced by an abundant supply of arrested individuals at virtually no cost. An eye opener of a book that is surprising to the uninformed, for example, President Wilson was broad minded in reference to the League of Nations but very close minded concerning race relations and Civil Rights invoking segregation of govt. employees and facilities. Remarkably, the author starts his story by telling about a young black man by the name of Green Cottenham who was an obvious free man long after the Civil War but was arrested for a fictitious charge and suddenly imprisoned. The author then follows the history of various counties, particularly in Alabama where peonage thrived, and he writes in detail about thousands of men and women imprisoned where he incorporates hundreds of factual stories of individuals abused, tortured and killed. He comes full circle to present time to talk to surviving family, particularly Green Cottenham's, about this horribly past. It is a very ugly history, but one that should be told because no matter how repugnant, it happened. There was no final act after the Civil War since there was no long term plan to asimilate or protect African Americans in a hostile environment. A workable long term plan was needed for both races that most likely required an economic stimulus in the post war south and a process for African Americans to make a living. The book also contains astonishing pictures from the period, one in particular showing a young man being punished by being tied to a pick axe, run below his knees with his hands tied to his ankles. One act of decency for that period would be for the States to buy and maintain the cemeteries containing the unmarked graves of the abused individuals and maintain them for eternity.
The Horror of Horrors May 13, 2008
sohocook (New York, New York USA)
22 out of 27 found this review helpful
I Just finished Slavery by Another Name. I had known about the black code for several years, but not the selling of free black people. I hate the Al Sharptons of the world or black people that defend criminals that blame their crime on racism. They disrespect all these ghosts of the past that suffered at the hands of brutal savage souls.
But one thing has changed for me: Although I never called anyone in my life a nigger, I thought it. After reading your book, I will never allow that thought to come to the surface again.
That photo of the man tied up on the ground felt his short life of suffering would have no meaning, but he was wrong, after 100 years we look at him and feel his pain and are influenced by his image forever. I wish I could embrace him and give him the love and respect every creature deserves.
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