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<blockquote>April 10, 2008<br>
Books of The Times<br>
What Emancipation Didn’t Stop After All<br>
By JANET MASLIN<br>
<br>
SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME<br>
The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World
War II<br>
By Douglas A. Blackmon<br>
Illustrated. 468 pages. Doubleday. $29.95.<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
In “Slavery by Another Name” Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerates one of
our schoolchildren’s most basic assumptions: that slavery in America
ended with the Civil War. Mr. Blackmon unearths shocking evidence
that the practice persisted well into the 20th century. And he is
not simply referring to the virtual bondage of black sharecroppers
unable to extricate themselves economically from farming.<br>
<br>
He describes free men and women forced into industrial servitude,
bound by chains, faced with subhuman living conditions and subject
to physical torture. That plight was horrific. But until 1951, it
was not outside the law.<br>
<br>
All it took was anything remotely resembling a crime. Bastardy,
gambling, changing employers without permission, false pretense,
“selling cotton after sunset”: these were all grounds for arrest in
rural Alabama by 1890. And as Mr. Blackmon explains in describing
incident after incident, an arrest could mean a steep fine. If the
accused could not pay this debt, he or she might be imprisoned.<br>
<br>
Alabama was among the Southern states that profitably leased
convicts to private businesses. As the book illustrates, arrest
rates and the labor needs of local businesses could conveniently be
made to dovetail.<br>
<br>
For the coal, lumber, turpentine, brick, steel and other interests
described here, a steady stream of workers amounted to a cheap
source of fuel. And the welfare of such workers was not the
companies’ concern. So in the case of John Clarke, convicted of
“gaming” on April 11, 1903, a 10-day stint in the Sloss-Sheffield
mine in Coalburg, Ala., could erase his fine. But it would take an
additional 104 days for him to pay fees to the sheriff, county clerk
and witnesses who appeared at his trial.<br>
<br>
In any case, Mr. Clarke survived for only one month and three days
in this captivity. The cause of his death was said to be falling
rock. At least another 2,500 men were incarcerated in Alabama labor
camps at that time.<br>
<br>
This is a very tough story to tell, and not just because of its
extremely graphic details. Mr. Blackmon, who was reared in the
Mississippi Delta and is now the Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall
Street Journal, must set forth a huge chunk of history. He writes of
how the emancipation of slaves left Southern plantations “not just
financially but intellectually bereft” because the slaves’ knowledge
and experience could be indispensable; how the rise of industry
reshaped the South; how a new generation of African-Americans who
had not known slavery found themselves threatened by it; how slavery
intersected with efforts to unionize labor; and even how, once
blacks lost their voting rights but still had clout at the
Republican convention, they were strategically important to
President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 election campaign.<br>
<br>
The roles of elected officials in acknowledging and stopping this
new slavery are a crucial part of Mr. Blackmon’s story. Needless to
say, it is complicated. The book describes the 1903 investigation
authorized by the Justice Department, the trial of accused slave
traders and the aggressive stance taken by Warren S. Reese Jr., the
United States attorney in Alabama, in prosecuting his case.<br>
<br>
“As allegations of slavery in his jurisdiction multiplied, Reese
demonstrated a prehensile comprehension of the murky legal framework
governing black labor,” Mr. Blackmon writes, “and a hard-nosed
unwillingness to ignore the implications of the extraordinary
evidence that soon poured into his office.”<br>
<br>
The resulting trial is among this book’s many zealously researched
episodes. (Mr. Blackmon’s sources range from corporate records to
one “Sheriff’s Feeding Account, 1899-1907.”) Its outcome was
promising, but there were loopholes. As one sign of this story’s
complexity, consider that the traders were tried on charges of
peonage.<br>
<br>
Those charges turned out not to be applicable in Alabama. And in
another such case, lawyers would argue that the charge should
instead be involuntary servitude. Reformers were dealing with “a
constitutional limbo in which slavery as a legal concept was
prohibited by the Constitution, but no statute made an act of
enslavement explicitly illegal.”<br>
<br>
Mr. Blackmon’s way of organizing this material is to bookend his
legal and historical chronicle with the personal story of Green
Cottenham, a black man born free in the mid-1880s. This gets
“Slavery by Another Name” off to a shaky start, if only because many
of Mr. Blackmon’s wordings are speculative. The book underscores
that if black Americans’ enslavement to U.S. Steel (which, when it
acquired the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, became a
prime offender) is analogous to the slavery that occurred in Nazi
Germany, it also emphasizes that the American slaves’ illiteracy
meant there would be no written records of their experience. So
imagining Mr. Green’s experience becomes something of a stretch.<br>
<br>
But as soon as it gets to more verifiable material, “Slavery by
Another Name” becomes relentless and fascinating. It exposes what
has been a mostly unexplored aspect of American history (though
there have been dissertations and a few books from academic
presses). It creates a broad racial, economic, cultural and
political backdrop for events that have haunted Mr. Blackmon and
will now haunt us all. And it need not exaggerate the hellish
details of intense racial strife.<br>
<br>
The torment that Mr. Blackmon catalogs is, if anything, understated
here. But it loudly and stunningly speaks for itself.<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/books/10masl.html?ref=douglasablackmon">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/books/10masl.html?ref=douglasablackmon</a><br>
<br>
<br>
On 4/19/11 10:41 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4DAE55F3.1090501@illinois.edu" type="cite">"[Much
of the post-Civil War history of African-Americans] remains
generally unknown. It is, of course, known that slaves were
formally freed during the American Civil War, and that after ten
years of relative freedom, the gains were mostly obliterated by
1877 as Reconstruction was brought to an end.
<br>
<br>
"But the horrifying story is only now being researched seriously,
most recently in a study called 'Slavery by another name' by Wall
Street Journal editor Douglas Blackmon. His work fills out the
bare bones with shocking detail, showing how after Reconstruction
African-American life was effectively criminalized, so that black
males virtually became a permanent slave labor force. Conditions,
however, were far worse than under slavery, for good capitalist
reasons. Slaves were property, a capital investment, and were
therefore cared for by their masters. Those criminalized for
merely existing are similar to wage laborers, in that the masters
have no responsibility for them, except to make sure that enough
are available. That was, in fact, one of the arguments used by
slave owners to claim that they were more moral than those who
hired labor. The argument was understood well enough by northern
workers, who regarded wage labor as preferable to literal slavery
only in that it was temporary, a position shared by Abraham
Lincoln among others.
<br>
<br>
"Criminalized black slavery provided much of the basis for the
American industrial revolution of the late 19th and early 20th
century. It continued until World War II, when free labor was
needed for war industry. During the postwar boom, which relied
substantially on the dynamic state sector that had been
established under the highly successful semi-command economy of
World War II, African-American workers gained a certain degree of
freedom for the first time since post-Civil War Reconstruction.
But since the 1970s that process is being reversed, thanks in no
small measure to the 'war on drugs,' which in some respects is a
contemporary analogue to the criminalization of black life after
the Civil War -- and also provides a fine disciplined labor force,
often in private prisons, in gross violation of international
labor regulations..."
<br>
<br>
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</blockquote>
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