Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
by Douglas A. Blackmon
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Book Summary Information
Author: Douglas A. BlackmonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-01-13
ISBN: 0385722702
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Anchor
Book Reviews of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
Book Review: Required Reading
Summary: 5 Stars
This book should be required reading for college history classes and information from it should be put in high school textbooks. Excellently written, extensively researched, it chronicles a little known chapter in American History: peonage, or forced labor, of African Americans after the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans were arrested on minor or flimsy charges such as vagrancy or changing employers without permission, or on false charges or were kidnapped outright. The were required to pay fines and when they (usually) couldn't afford them, they were sentenced to long terms of forced labor on farms, factories and mines where they endured hard and dangerous labor with inadequate food in dirty cells with filthy pest-ridden mattresses without a change of clothes for weeks. They were subject to beatings and torture and many died by accident or disease or first or second degree murder from the guards and owners. Women, in a continuation of the rights that white men have believed they were entitled to since being slave holders, were used sexually. When the convict's time was up they were told they had incrued debt and were resentenced. Often they never got out.
This type of slavery was worse than being owned as a slave because whereas an owned slave was valuable property the forced laborer was simply an expendable work horse to be used up and abused.
Whites were either complicit or looked the other way in most cases. Even the federal government, whose presidents were either mildly racist as in the case of Theodore Roosevelt, or openly white supremicist such as Woodrow Wilson, decided to leave the south to work out it's own issues. Right after the war it was clear that whites in the government and society as a whole either thought it too much trouble and too much of a sacrifice to integrate blacks into society or plainly did not want them as equals. As early as 1876 Ulysses S. Grant told his cabinet that the fifteenth amendment which gave blacks the right to vote had been a mistake and said: "It had done the Negro no good and had been a hindrance to the south and by no means a political advantage to the north." It was only World War II that ended peonage because it was recognized that the enemies of the U.S. would use the downtrodden second-class citizenship of blacks against them.
Southerners, angry that slavery had been abolished just continued the practice. The rights to hold office and to vote which were given African Americans after the war were taken away in the south by the turn of the century. In fact, Woodrow Wilson when elected in 1912 took away many of the few rights African Americans had left. So--slavery and states rights still existed. Was the Civil War fought for nothing?
Even without the forced labor slavery system, life for blacks after the war was akin to slavery. Blackman says that the work available to a black man was "free labor camps that functioned like prison, cotton tenancy that equated to serfdom or prison mines filled with slaves."
This book gives a new perspective on when slavery actually ended, not in 1865 but in the 1940's. Those living during the Civil War time are long dead but many of the people who grew up with this neo-slavery and the racism surrounding it are still alive.
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Summary of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
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.Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Douglas A. Blackmon 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 shortly thereafter. By turns moving, sobering, and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.19th Century Books
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