Slave Trade

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

Review by Daniel Hurley for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
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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.

Review by Herbert L Calhoun for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
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Who won the Civil War?

Introduction

According to the subtext of this book, the answer depends on what is meant by the question. If you mean militarily, then of course there is no question but that the North won the war. However, if you mean who won the hearts, minds and souls of white America, then it is equally clear from the evidence that unfolded over the next one hundred years, that the winner was the South.

It matters little that each side had different goals and more importantly different pretexts to disguise its goals. In retrospect, and from any angle, this book’s focus on “forced labor” proves that the result are all the same: For the North, “ending slavery” was just a pretext to gain control over the lucrative cotton markets and gain hegemony over the South, and do so at the time cotton drove the international economy in the same way that oil drives it today. However, it was the South that kept its eye on the ball. Unlike the North, the South was un-conflicted about the full meaning and importance of slavery: Southerners knew at a deep level that slavery was not only the lynch pen of the Southern way of life, it was the existential process that defined what it meant to be a white man in America, period.

Thus, if the war was about the existential existence of white maleness, then clearly this book, and the unfolding of the next 100 years of American history that it describes, proves that the South won the Civil War. Because this author makes it as clear as the sun is in the sky, that since the South’s victory, wherever the South goes, the North is sure and soon to follow. It is this story, so skillfully buried within the subtext of this book that makes it such an important contribution to American history.

The Book

This is a masterful and scholarly story about the re-enslavement of blacks, as that process began in the aftermath of the Civil War. It took place when “Reconstruction” was willingly dismantled by the ruling North-South coalition of the day, codified in the compromise of 1876, which ended in the election of Rutherford B. Hayes. As blacks (and any real chance for a true democratic America) were thrown under the bus, “Reconstruction” ended. Northern soldiers left blacks to their own devices, and a conscious period of southern lawlessness and violence ensued. Southern Rebels renamed this period of violence and lawlessness “the Redemption.”

This very thoughtful and carefully written manuscript is told through the rigors of the author’s own prodigious research, which includes many private and previously undisturbed records, research that is seen through the life and lineage of one black man, named Green Cottingham. Green serves as the historical prototype and “stand-in” for tens of thousands of anonymous Blacks who did not manage to survive the forced labor camps. Like many of them, Green too was arrested on “trumped up” charges of vagrancy at the tender age of 14 and spent the rest of his youth and a great deal of his adulthood in a new kind of “existential slavery” called “forced labor” work camps run by the likes of the infamous U.S. Steel Company, in and around the environs of Birmingham, Alabama.

During the “Redemption,” “forced labor” became the organizing concept upon which the “new Slavery” was built. It appeared in several guises, for instance, as debt peonage, sharecropping, indentured or contract servitude, forced work camps, and prison release farms, as well as ordinary prisons, among others — all forms that were clearly (after the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment) both illicit and illegal.

But since various forms of forced labor continued to serve the immediate needs of a fearful and prostrate South, and no one cared, forced labor became the de facto, legal standard and status of the black condition in the South. Through it, Blacks effectively were returned to slavery during a time when (just as had been the case during the Civil War), southerners had no choice but to become dependent on Blacks for running their farms, helping to build railroads and transportation systems, and fueling the factories that ran the war, and re-establishing the industrial energy and might of the South. In short, the very existence of the southern way of life depended critically on both black skills and black labor -all at a time and in a region very much “cash strapped” due to losses during the Civil War.

The prototype, which greased the wheels of the “forced labor” stratagem was the collusion between big Northern corporations, such as U.S. Steel, and corrupt Southern municipal officials such as local town judges, sheriffs and others, who together saw it as their patriotic duty to deny and bar Negroes from exercising their newly won freedoms. And, to the extent possible, to eliminate them in every area of life from being potential competitors of the white race generally, and the white working class in particular. And of course, the sons of the Confederacy also hoped that by hook-or-crook, they would somehow prevent their previous chattel from ever gaining dominion over them. In the end, the goal of the Civil war: was to be able to return to the idyllic era of having the free skills, services and labor provided by blacks that had been throughout the period of legal slavery, all but a birth right to the landed gentry.

What is most interesting about the author’s research is that it reveals in its subtext, an underlying pattern at the core of all organized white resistance in America to black advancement, a pattern that still exists today even as we prepare to elect our first Black President. This pattern is the poisonous snake coiled in the bosom of American democracy. It is one that fails to acknowledge the long-term effects of cycles after cycle of blacks being beaten-down by oppression, and the long-term psychic injury of them seeing one generation rise up only to see the next one beaten down again and again by new cycles of “improved more subtle forms of discrimination,” white violence, or changes in the rules and laws so as to maintains in a steady state the mental and social apartheid that the South knew would forever keep the races apart.

The American historical record is replete with episodes in which our leaders, whenever they were faced with a true choice between a path toward complete democracy, or complete racial repression, or some modest point in between — such as” civil” and “paper equality, ” have emphatically chosen one of the latter, but never true democracy. As is the case here; and at the writing of the Constitution; both before and after the Civil War; and at the beginning rather than at the end of WW-II, the nation that professed with such solemnity to be the greatest democracy, has always chosen to turn away from democracy if it meant full equality for its ex-slaves.

Even today as we prepare to elect our first black President, white America has always been motivated by the need to maintain, at a minimum, white cultural hegemony over blacks, either through race-based moral, religious and political codes, or failing that, through manipulating and corrupting the legal system to maintain a racist steady state. Today as during the days of the “Redemption, there is the same uneasy racial modus vivendi between blacks and whites that has existed since 1876.

A forerunner of today’s draconian and discriminatory “crack” cocaine laws, which, when coupled with incarceration for failure to pay child support and for spousal abuse, results in a disproportionally large numbers of young single black men being swept off the streets and into the nation’s jails, has its precedent in the forced labor laws cobbled together during the last days of the “Redemption” and that is so skillfully recounted here.

Immediately after the Civil War and up until about 1950, in most cities of the South, black men without jobs, could be capriciously swept off the streets and hauled into court, fined, and given lengthy jail sentences. Rules that required a prisoner to “work off his fine,” meant that even light sentences often became in-determinant and thus unpredictably long ones. The same is true today, where the sentencing guidelines are used capriciously to mete out much harsher sentences to blacks than to white. For instance, in a sentencing guideline of 10 to life, evidence shows that whites overwhelmingly are released towards the lower end and blacks towards the higher end of these guidelines. As this book notes, by 1900, the South’s judicial system had been completely reconfigured to make coercion of blacks comply with traditional American social rules all of which were forged in the 300 years of slavery. Today, with Obama’s election as a backdrop, not much in that regard has changed.

500 stars.

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.

Review by William E. Perry Jr. for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
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If nothing else, Mr. Blackmon should be seriously considered for a Pulitzer Prize with his publication of “Slavery by Another Name.” He has not only written a MUST read book for all Americans, but he has seriously altered the way we must look at American history. Mr. Blackmon’s work cuts through that old hiding place for so many Americans: “Slavery was a loooooong time ago, so I couldn’t have had anything to do with it.” Blackmon’s book puts modern day slavery well within the lifetimes of a great many living Americans and holds us all responsible for its existence in one way or another. There were those who participated and benefitted directly, and there were those who benefitted by never objecting though they knew it was going on, and there is just the general public who all benefitted from the underpaid labors of slaves, not prior to the Civil War, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For those who do not understand the anger of black Americans feel for white Americans, they need only to step into the pages of this incredible book and the reason for that anger will become instantly clear. Actually what would not make sense would be for black Americans to not be angry – that would indicate that they were crazy. Blackmon’s book represents a prodigious amount of research, the careful, precise, deep kind of research that is hard to refute; he has uncovered facts about a situation that cannot be denied. Blackmon’s book should not only be required reading in every American history course, it should be a text book in most. I worry about Mr. Blackmon personally as I wonder how he could roam around in this kind of material without himself becoming deeply depressed. Albeit he is an experienced journalist probably able to shake off the horrors of any situation he writes about, but still, this is no ordinary situation, with no ordinary facts. This is a story that no doubt has changed Mr. Blackmon himself, and I daresay that it will change everyone who reads it. And I suggest that every person even mildly interested in altering the course of this country put Mr. Blackmon’s book on their MUST read list, and as they do they should keep in mind the words of George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Review by Marty Duren for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
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Sub-titled, “The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” the volume deals with a little remembered period in the southern US that followed emancipation and continued into the first decades of the Jim Crow era during which “separate but equal” led inevitably to “colored” water fountains, back of the bus riding, serving African Americans out of the back of restaurants, turning a blind eye to crimes against African Americans, etc. Having lived in the south my entire life this book was intriguing on its face, but I had no idea just how ignorant I was about the history of the places of my raising. The essence of the book is that slavery in the US did not end in the 1860′s as we have believed, but in the mid 1940′s. The argument is bulletproof. Slavery did not disappear; it simply changed names.

Immediately following Lincoln’s Proclamation that granted freedom to all slaves in the US there was confusion in the South. Was it really freedom? Where would these millions of freed slaves live and work? Could they really vote? What would happen to the land belonging to whites? Would there be an occupying army from the North for months or years? How would the economy, which had become substantial in steel and cotton production, be rebuilt without slaves? It would not take long for these questions to be answered in the most horrifying way-a way that would make some antebellum plantations and the sipping of mint juleps while black hands deftly cleared cotton bolls under the threat of the lash pale by comparison. Blackmon writes, “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.”

The core essential to the re-enslavement was the “convict lease” program entered into by many corporations and plantation owners. In order to provide cheap labor for the burgeoning mining industry, lumber yards, mills, and turpentine production, businesses as large as U. S. Steel (via its subsidiary Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.) would “lease” convicts for labor-convicts that could not pay off the fines and debts charged to them in court. The problem was that the legal system that grew from this arrangement had a single purpose: the arrest and conviction of African American men who had no means of paying the fines and fees assigned to them so that they could be “leased” to a corporate entity for a period of time (say, 100 days) after which time they would supposedly be freed.

Across the “Black Belt” of the old South, small town governments gave wide latitude to local sheriffs, constables and justices of the peace to arrest, on the flimsiest of evidence, convict, sentence and lease prisoners. The laws that were passed and enforced were, primarily, those of which African-Americans would be found “guilty”: vagrancy (vaguely defined as not being able to prove at a given moment that one has a job), making a pass at a white woman, leaving employment without permission from the employer (creating permanent servitude). At sentencing a “friend” or corporation would pay the fine and associated fees thereby taking possession of the prisoner until the debt was paid or lease the prisoner from the controlling government. The “convict” would then be taken to a place such as the Pratt Mines in Birmingham, the Chattahoochee Brick Company in Atlanta or one of any number of plantations or forests across the south. Once in the system, any person could be sub-leased any number of times making it almost impossible for concerned family members to ever find them. Powerful Atlanta families as well known and honored in memory as the Woodruffs and the Hurts were involved in this chicanery to various degrees.

Additionally, once leased, any infraction could add days, weeks, months or years to a sentence that might have been as short as 30 days. Broken tools, stolen food, lack of productivity and others infractions real and imagined could and did accumulate at the time of impending freedom for many, if they were blessed enough to live that long. Because of the endless supply of African Americans to be arrested, there was little to no incentive for the corporations or landowners to take care of those they had leased. In the slavery era, each slave represented a capital investment from which the slave owner expected a return. To kill a slave was akin to throwing money in the wind. The convict lease program removed all need for such “compassion.” At the Slope No. 12 mine outside Birmingham, AL, men were daily loosed from their barrack shackles at 3:00 AM, taken into a labyrinth of tunnels underground, worked all day in excrement fouled waters, brought back above ground after nightfall only seeing the sun on Sunday. That, of course, was the Lord’s Day and the white folks did not work.

Murder, contagion, rape and intentional sickness from drinking the defiled tunnel water were common. Those who died were dumped unceremoniously into unmarked graves at the edges of the massive compound. The call would then go out for more workers. Which meant more trumped up charges. More arrests. More money changing hands. In a single year, 25% of the income for the State of Alabama came from the convict lease program.

With the exception of an extended investigation under President Teddy Roosevelt and a tenacious, heroic effort by an Assistant U. S. Attorney named Warren Reese, virtually nothing was done to stop, as the author phrased it during our discussion, this “malevolent exclusion of justice.” In the aftermath of the Civil War and the still tenuous relationship between North and South, the investigations ended in minor penalties on some very guilty men with most sentences being suspended. Had he been supported with a little backbone from those in Washington, DC, Reese may well have gone down in history as the William Wilberforce of his generation. But it was not to be.

Anyone raised in the south should read this book. Anyone interested in racial understanding or reconciliation issues should read this book. IMO, it will set a standard for understanding this period of American history. It is a deep and profound work.