Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

What do we fear? None of my K-12 teachers explained to us what happened AFTER the emancipation. Were students to assume Lincoln freed them and they lived happily ever after. The historians ‘misled us by omission’. Convict leasing, black codes, Jim Crow were topics no one discussed. Books like Slavery by Another Name must be shared, not banned.

In this shocking expose Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta Bureau Chief for the Wall Street Journal, explores the large-scale re-enslavement of Black Americans after the end of the Civil War. This little known story, that barely gets a mention in most history books, is revealed to have impacted hundreds of thousands of blacks in the Deep South in the late 19th Century and the first half of the 20th Century. This system was to continue for the better part of eighty years, and was not to end until the early days of WWII.The seeds of this system had first been formulated during the later part of the Civil War. The small but critical industrial core of the South was in desperate need of laborers for the hard and dangerous jobs of coal mining and iron-producing for the Confederate military. With the critical need for every white male to fight for the Confederacy, leased slaves were the perfect solution for this dilemma.After Reconstruction and especially after the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was struck down by the Supreme Court, a system akin to the slavery leasing system quickly developed in much of the Deep South. This new convict leasing system consisted of the arrest of many young blacks by local sheriffs on minor or even non-existent grounds. The arrested would then be sentenced to several weeks or months in jail with legal costs paid by the convicted. These relatively short sentences would then be extended to years to enable the prisoners to pay off their legal expenses. The prisoners would then be leased out to large plantations, coal mining companies, or iron-producing corporations to do extremely dangerous jobs under the most despicable of conditions. Thus "neo-slavery" was born.This book is far more than a mere recitation of the key historical and political events of this era, as interesting as that might be. For Blackmon has infused the historical scenario with the compelling, intriguing, and ultimately tragic story of Green Cottenham - a young man caught up in this saga of re-enslavement. Green Cottenham's story and that of his family, gives the reader a connection and an understanding of the true consequences of this shameful chapter in U.S. history. This Pulitzer Prize winning book elaborates on the historical record by telling the story of the few who fought unsuccessfully against the system, the companies that most profited from it, and the insidious legacy it left in its wake.For those people who thought that slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, this book will be a stunning revelation.

As documented in Douglas Blackmon's book, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, the institution of slavery in the U.S. South largely ended for as long as 20 years in some places upon completion of the U.S. civil war. And then it was back again, in a slightly different form, widespread, controlling, publicly known and accepted -- right up to World War II. In fact, in other forms, it remains today. But it does not remain today in the overpowering form that prevented a civil rights movement for nearly a century. It exists today in ways that we are free to oppose and resist, and we fail to do so only to our own shame.During widely publicized trials of slave owners for the crime of slavery in 1903 -- trials that did virtually nothing to end the pervasive practice -- the Montgomery Advertiser editorialized: "Forgiveness is a Christian virtue and forgetfulness is often a relief, but some of us will never forgive nor forget the damnable and brutal excesses that were committed all over the South by negroes and their white allies, many of whom were federal officials, against whose acts our people were practically powerless."This was a publicly acceptable position in Alabama in 1903: slavery should be tolerated because of the evils committed by the North during the war and during the occupation that followed. It's worth considering whether slavery might have ended more quickly had it been ended without a war. To say that is not, of course, to assert that in reality the pre-war United States was radically different than it was, that slave owners were willing to sell out, or that either side was open to a non-violent solution. But most nations that ended slavery did so without a civil war. Some did it in the way that Washington, D.C., did it, through compensated emancipation.Had the United States ended slavery without the war and without division, it would have been, by definition, a very different and less violent place. But, beyond that, it would have avoided the bitter war resentment that has yet to die down. Ending racism would have been a very lengthy process, regardless. But it might have been given a head start rather than having one arm tied behind our backs. Our stubborn refusal to recognize the U.S. civil war as a hindrance to freedom rather than the path to it, allows us to devastate places like Iraq and then marvel at the duration of the resulting animosity.Wars acquire new victims for many years after they end, even if all the cluster bombs are picked up. Just try to imagine the justifications that would be made for Israel's attacks on Palestinians had World War II not happened.Had the Northern U.S. allowed the South to secede, ended the returning of "fugitive slaves," and used diplomatic and economic means to urge the South to abolish slavery, it seems reasonable to suppose that slavery might have lasted in the South beyond 1865, but very likely not until 1945. To say this is, once again, not to imagine that it actually happened, or that there weren't Northerners who wanted it to happen and who really didn't care about the fate of enslaved African Americans. It is just to put into proper context the traditional defense of the civil war as having murdered hundreds of thousands of people on both sides in order to accomplish the greater good of ending slavery. Slavery did not end.Across most of the South, a system of petty, even meaningless, crimes, such as "vagrancy," created the threat of arrest for any black person. Upon arrest, a black man would be presented with a debt to pay through years of hard labor. The way to protect oneself from being put into one of the hundreds of forced labor camps was to put oneself in debt to and under the protection of a white owner. The 13th Amendment sanctions slavery for convicts, and no statute prohibited slavery until the 1950s. All that was needed for the pretense of legality was the equivalent of today's plea bargain.Not only did slavery not end. For many thousands it was dramatically worsened. The antebellum slave owner typically had a financial interest in keeping an enslaved person alive and healthy enough to work. A mine or mill that purchased the work of hundreds of convicts had no interest in their futures beyond the term of their sentences. In fact, local governments would replace a convict who died with another, so there was no economic reason not to work them to death. Mortality rates for leased-out convicts in Alabama were as high as 45 percent per year. Some who died in mines were tossed into coke ovens rather than going to the trouble to bury them.Enslaved Americans after the "ending of slavery" were bought and sold, chained by the ankles and necks at night, whipped to death, waterboarded, and murdered at the discretion of their owners, such as U.S. Steel Corporation which purchased mines near Birmingham where generations of "free" people were worked to death underground.The threat of that fate hung over every black man not enduring it, as well as the threat of lynching that escalated in the early 20th century along with newly pseudo-scientific justifications for racism. "God ordained the southern white man to teach the lessons of Aryan supremacy," declared Woodrow Wilson's friend Thomas Dixon, author of the book and play The Clansman, which became the film Birth of a Nation.Five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government decided to take prosecuting slavery seriously, to counter possible criticism from Germany or Japan.Five years after World War II, a group of former Nazis, some of whom had used slave labor in caves in Germany, set up shop in Alabama to work on creating new instruments of death and space travel. They found the people of Alabama extremely forgiving of their past deeds.Prison labor continues in the United States. Mass incarceration continues as a tool of racial oppression. Slave farm labor continues as well. So does the use of fines and debt to create convicts. And of course, companies that swear they would never do what their earlier versions did, profit from slave labor on distant shores.But what ended mass-slavery in the United States for good was not the idiotic mass-slaughter of the civil war. It was the nonviolent educational and moral force of the civil rights movement a full century later.

It's an eye-opening indictment again so many people. I find it very difficult to read simply because this truth is so ugly. I'm ashamed, as a white person, of the white race. I have read very few, if any, uglier books. Shame on us all.

good book

Além da inquestionável qualidade do conteúdo, fisicamente o livro é ótimo. A cor das folhas, o tamanho das letras, a qualidade das imagens, enfim, garantida está a satisfação do leitor.

A superbly researched work that exposes how chattel slavery continued, on a literally industrial scale, in the United States until the 1940s. It reveals the connivance of the federal government in allowing these crimes against humanity to continue unchecked and the vast profits accumulated by individuals and corporations from the continued enslavement of Afrikan people in the US. The book reveals that it was the fear of international exposure of this continued slavery undermining US war propaganda; far more than any moral impetus that led to the federal government finally bringing slavery to an end in the US. The book is only spoiled by the refusal to support the obvious case for reparations that the text clearly makes. The author describes in methodical detail the economic basis for this mass exploitation and yet offers up the ridiculous idea of a museum as a suitable response to this vastly profitable slave industry. No surprise, but disappointing. A must read book nonetheless, particularly for Afrikan people under any illusions about what really took place in the US following the end of the Civil War.

Blackmon's book should be standard reading material in US classrooms. No study on modern slavery --post Civil War- has tackled these horrific practices and linked them to both legitimate corporations and the US government. He is right to say this period ought to be called neo-slavery because labelling it "Jim Crow" is an afront to African Americans --likening one of the darkest periods of US history to a black-face minstrel act. State-by-state participation in the horrific treatment of Black Americans is shocking but these are stories all school children must be aware of. Slavery did not end with Lincoln's proclamation of emancipation... it took on new, even more heinous and torturous forms where Black lives had even less worth than during the Antebellum. This is the story how black men (mostly) were simply arrested and put into bonded labor camps across the deep South. WHY dont American history classes teach the Truth?! Fantastic book from a brilliant Wall Street Journal reporter who can tell a great story, packed with legal/historical documents.