Slavery by Another Name

Last updated

Slavery by Another Name
Slavery by Another Name (book cover).jpg
Author Douglas A. Blackmon
Subject African-American history, disfranchisement after Reconstruction era
GenreNon-fiction
Publisher Anchor Books
Publication date
2008
Pages468 pp. [1]
ISBN 978-0-385-50625-0

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II is a book by American writer Douglas A. Blackmon, published by Anchor Books in 2008. [2] It explores the forced labor of prisoners, overwhelmingly African American men, through the convict lease system used by states, local governments, white farmers, and corporations after the American Civil War until World War II in the southern United States. Blackmon argues that slavery in the United States did not end with the Civil War, but instead persisted well into the 20th century. It depicts the subjugation of convict leasing, sharecropping and peonage and tells the fate of the former but not of the latter two.

Contents

Slavery by Another Name began as an article which Blackmon wrote for The Wall Street Journal detailing the use of black forced labor by U.S. Steel Corporation. Seeing the popular response to the article, he began conducting research for a more comprehensive exploration of the topic. The resulting book was well received by critics and became a New York Times Best Seller. In 2009, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. In 2012, it was adapted into a documentary film of the same name for PBS.

Background

Douglas Blackmon is a Wall Street Journal reporter. He grew up in Washington County, Mississippi, where as a seventh grader he was encouraged by his teacher and his mother to research a local racist incident, despite the opposition of some citizens. The experience began a lifelong interest in the history of American race relations. [3]

In 2003, Blackmon wrote a story on the use of black convict labor in the coal mines of U.S. Steel. The story generated a large response, and was later anthologized in Best Business Stories. [4] Blackmon began to research the subject more widely, visiting various southern county courthouses to obtain records of arrest, conviction, and sentences.

He later stated:

[A]s I began to research, even I, as someone who had been paying attention to some of these sorts of things for a long time and was open to alternative explanations, even I was fairly astonished when I put it together, basically by going county by county and finding the criminal arrest records and the jail records in county after county after county from this period of time and seeing that if there had been crime waves, there had to have been records of crimes and people being arrested for crimes. And in reality, it's just not there.

There's no evidence that that ever happened. In fact, it's the opposite. The crime waves that occurred by and large were the aftermath of the war and whites coming back from fighting in the Civil War and settling scores with people and all sorts of renegade activity that didn't involve black people at all, but they were blamed for it, and that was then used as a kind of ruse for why these incredibly brutal new legal measures then began to be put in place. [5]

The resulting book, Slavery by Another Name, was published by Anchor Books in 2008. [6]

Contents

In the introduction to Slavery by Another Name, Blackmon describes his experience as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal "asking a provocative question: What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?" [7] His story describing corporate use of black forced labor in the post-Civil War South generated more response than any other piece he had written, and inspired him to pursue a book-length study of the subject (see Reconstruction Era).

Blackmon structures his narrative around a young African-American man named Green Cottenham; though the records of Cottenham's life are incomplete, Blackmon says that "the absence of his voice rests at the center of this book." [8] Cottenham, who was born in the 1880s to two former slaves, was arrested in 1908 for vagrancy, a common pretext to detain blacks who did not have a white patron. The state of Alabama rented Cottenham as a laborer to a coal mine owned by U.S. Steel Corporation, where he died.

As context, Blackmon describes the beginnings of "industrial slavery", [9] in which convict laborers were put to work in factories or mines rather than cotton fields. Though slaves were formally emancipated by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution following the Civil War, after Reconstruction, white-dominated Southern state legislatures passed Black Codes, "an array of interlocking laws essentially intended to criminalize black life", [10] to restrict the economic independence of blacks and provide pretexts for jail terms. Blacks were often unable to pay even small fees and were sentenced to labor as a result; convicts were leased to plantations, lumber camps, and mines to be used for forced labor. [11] Joseph E. Brown, former governor of Georgia, amassed great wealth based on his use of convict labor in his Dade Coal Company mines and other enterprises, from 1874 to 1894. [12]

In the early 20th century, federal prosecutors such as Eugene Reese attempted to prosecute responsible parties under federal laws against debt bondage. But such efforts received little support nationally and none in the South, which had disenfranchised most blacks to exclude them from the political system. Northern attention was focused on immigration and World War I. The convict lease system finally ended with the advent of World War II. National and presidential attention was focused on racial issues because of the need for national unity and mobilization of the military. [11]

In the book's epilogue, Blackmon argues for the importance of acknowledging this history of forced labor:

[T]he evidence moldering in county courthouses and the National Archives compels us to confront this extinguished past, to recognize the terrible contours of the record, to teach our children the truth of a terror that pervaded much of American life, to celebrate its end, to lift any shame on those who could not evade it. This book is not a call for financial reparations. Instead, I hope it is a formidable plea for a resurrection and fundamental reinterpretation of a tortured chapter in the collective American past. [13]

Reception

The book was a New York Times Best Seller [14] and was praised by critics. According to Book Marks, the book received "positive" reviews based on four critic reviews with one being "rave" and three being "positive". [15]

Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that it "eviscerates a basic assumption: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War." She praised the book's evidence as "relentless and fascinating," although she thought that the conceit of reconstructing Cottenham's life gives the book "a shaky start". [16] Leonard Pitts, a columnist for the Miami Herald, wrote that "Slavery by Another Name is an astonishing book. It will challenge and change your understanding of what we were as Americans - and of what we are. I cannot recommend it to you highly enough." [17]

W. Fitzhugh Brundage wrote in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education that

Blackmon deserves high praise for this deeply moving and troubling history. He especially deserves praise for teasing out the largest implications of his research. He aptly, and carefully, draws parallels between the corporate responsibility of companies that exploited slave labor in Nazi Germany and that of southerners who bought convict labor. [18]

In the Sunday Gazette-Mail , Chris Vognar called the book "chilling, doggedly reported and researched". [19] A review in the Rocky Mountain News stated of the book, "Displaying meticulous research, and personalizing the larger story through individual experiences, Blackmon's book opens the eyes and wrenches the gut." [20]

African American Studies scholar James Smethurst was more critical, writing in The Boston Globe that "this catalogue of the nadir is one of the book's weaknesses, since it sometimes departs from its account of peonage without much transition. Paying more attention to the considerable presence of involuntary servitude in African-American literature and intellectual history, reaching back to Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar, would have helped". However, he concludes that "the book vividly and engagingly recalls the horror and sheer magnitude of such neo-slavery and reminds us how long after emancipation such practices persisted." [21]

Slavery by Another Name was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The award committee called it "a precise and eloquent work that examines a deliberate system of racial suppression and rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity." [22]

In 2011, Mark Melvin, an inmate at the Kilby Correctional Facility, was banned from reading the book by Alabama Department of Corrections officials. They described it as "an attempt to incite violence based on race, religion, sex, creed or nationality". [23] Melvin filed a lawsuit stating that his First Amendment rights had been violated. [23] Blackmon said of the officials' actions that "The idea that a book like mine is somehow incendiary or a call to violence is so absurd". [24]

Film adaptation

Slavery by Another Name was adapted as a 90-minute documentary film, which premiered on PBS in February 2012. [25] The film was executive produced by Catherine Allan of Twin Cities Public Television, co-executive produced by Blackmon, directed by Sam Pollard, written by Sheila Curran Bernard, and narrated by Laurence Fishburne. It was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Slavery by Another Name premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012. [26] The film is streaming free online, in English and with Haitian-Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish subtitles. A 20-minute classroom version Archived October 10, 2017, at the Wayback Machine with curriculum materials is also available.

Neil Genzliger of The New York Times wrote of the film that "by filling in an overlooked part of black history, this sobering film enhances our understanding of why race issues have proved so intractable." [27]

Daniel Fienberg of Hitfix, viewing the film at Sundance, wrote

Slavery By Another Name is sturdy and well-researched stuff and it will play well when it airs on PBS next month and it should play well in the future in classrooms, but as a film festival entry, it isn't nearly confident enough in its artistry. There's no harm in a dry history lesson, but Pollard may have hoped to achieve more than that. [28]

Kunbi Tinuoye, writing for the Griot, described the film as a "powerful documentary" that "challenges the widely held belief that the enslavement of African-Americans ended with President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863." [29]

The film was one of four projects (together with The Abolitionists,The Loving Story [30] and Freedom Riders) included in "Created Equal: America's Civil Rights Struggle Archived October 17, 2018, at the Wayback Machine "—a nationwide community engagement initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, designed to reach 500 communities between September 2013 and extended from December 2016 to December 2018. [31]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution</span> 1865 Reconstruction amendment

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The amendment was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on December 6, 1865, and proclaimed on December 18. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Underground Railroad</span> Network for fugitive slaves in 19th-century U.S.

The Underground Railroad was used by freedom seekers from slavery in the United States and was generally an organized network of secret routes and safe houses. Enslaved Africans and African Americans escaped from slavery as early as the 16th century and many of their escapes were unaided, but the network of safe houses operated by agents generally known as the Underground Railroad began to organize in the 1780s among Abolitionist Societies in the North. It ran north and grew steadily until the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863 by President Abraham Lincoln. The escapees sought primarily to escape into free states, and from there to Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slavery in the United States</span>

The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peon</span> Social category

Peon usually refers to a person subject to peonage: any form of wage labor, financial exploitation, coercive economic practice, or policy in which the victim or a laborer (peon) has little control over employment or economic conditions. Peon and peonage can refer to both the colonial period and post-colonial period of Latin America, as well as the period after the end of slavery in the United States, when "Black Codes" were passed to retain African-American freedmen as labor through other means.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph E. Brown</span> American politician (1821–1894)

Joseph Emerson Brown, often referred to as Joe Brown, was an American attorney and politician, serving as the 42nd Governor of Georgia from 1857 to 1865, the only governor to serve four terms. He also served as a United States Senator from that state from 1880 to 1891.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">B. B. Comer</span> American politician (1848–1927)

Braxton Bragg Comer was an American politician who served as the 33rd governor of Alabama from 1907 to 1911, and a United States senator in 1920. As governor, he achieved railroad reform, lowering business rates in Alabama to make them more competitive with other states. He increased funding for the public school system, resulting in more rural schools and high schools in each county for white students and a rise in the state's literacy rate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African-American history</span>

African-American history started with the arrival of Africans to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries. Formerly enslaved Spaniards who had been freed by Francis Drake arrived aboard the Golden Hind at New Albion in California in 1579. The European colonization of the Americas, and the resulting Atlantic slave trade, led to a large-scale transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic; of the roughly 10–12 million Africans who were sold by the Barbary slave trade, either to European slavery or to servitude in the Americas, approximately 388,000 landed in North America. After arriving in various European colonies in North America, the enslaved Africans were sold to white colonists, primarily to work on cash crop plantations. A group of enslaved Africans arrived in the English Virginia Colony in 1619, marking the beginning of slavery in the colonial history of the United States; by 1776, roughly 20% of the British North American population was of African descent, both free and enslaved.

The Black Codes, sometimes called the Black Laws, were laws which governed the conduct of African Americans. In 1832, James Kent wrote that "in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political privileges, between free white persons and free colored persons of African blood; and in no part of the country do the latter, in point of fact, participate equally with the whites, in the exercise of civil and political rights." Although Black Codes existed before the Civil War and although many Northern states had them, the Southern U.S. states codified such laws in everyday practice. The best known of these laws were passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and in order to compel them to work for either low or no wages.

James Warren English was an American politician, bank president, and a staff officer during the American Civil War. He was a reconstruction Era mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, from 1881 until 1883.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joel Hurt</span>

Joel Hurt (1850–1926) was an American businessman. He was the president of Trust Company of Georgia, and a developer in Atlanta. He was one of the many founders of SunTrust Bank.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Convict leasing</span> Penal labor system in the Southern United States

Convict leasing was a system of forced penal labor that was practiced historically in the Southern United States before it was formally abolished during the 20th century. Under this system, private individuals and corporations could lease labor from the state in the form of prisoners, nearly all of which were black.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas A. Blackmon</span> American writer and journalist

Douglas A. Blackmon is an American writer and journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of slavery in Virginia</span>

Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.

The Beauford H. Jester Complex, formerly the Jester State Prison Farm, refers to a complex of Texas Department of Criminal Justice prisons for men in unincorporated Fort Bend County, Texas, United States. Individually they are Jester I Unit, Carol Vance Unit, Jester III Unit, and Wayne Scott Unit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Calcis, Alabama</span> Unincorporated community in Alabama, United States

Calcis is an unincorporated community in Shelby County, Alabama, United States, located along Alabama State Route 25, 3 miles (4.8 km) north-northwest of Vincent.

Aldrich is an unincorporated community in Shelby County, Alabama, United States, that is now part of Montevallo.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. W. Comer</span>

John Wallace Comer was a businessman, slave owner, mine operator and planter in Alabama during the Reconstruction Era and the early 1900s. The brother of Alabama Governor B. B. Comer, John Wallace Comer operated the Comer family plantation in Barbour County, Alabama. J. W. Comer served from 1863 until 1865 in the 57th Alabama Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War. J. W. Comer also operated the Eureka Iron Works throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of unfree labor in the United States</span>

The history of forced labor in the United States encompasses to all forms of unfree labor which have occurred within the present day borders of the United States through the modern era. "Unfree labor" is a generic or collective term for those work relations, in which people are employed against their will by the threat of destitution, detention, violence, lawful compulsion, or other extreme hardship to themselves or to members of their families.

The Chattahoochee Brick Company was a brickworks located on the banks of the Chattahoochee River in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The brickworks, founded by Atlanta mayor James W. English in 1878, is notable for its extensive use of convict lease labor, wherein hundreds of African American convicts worked in conditions similar to those experienced during antebellum slavery. It is speculated that some workers who died at the brickworks were buried on its grounds. The brickworks was discussed in Douglas A. Blackmon's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Slavery by Another Name, released in 2008. The property ceased to be an active brickworks in 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of slavery in Colorado</span>

The history of slavery in Colorado began centuries before Colorado achieved statehood when Spanish colonists of Santa Fe de Nuevo México (1598–1848) enslaved Native Americans, called Genízaros. Southern Colorado was part of the Spanish territory until 1848. Comanche and Utes raided villages of other indigenous people and enslaved them.

References

  1. ↑ "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II". WorldCat. OCLC   845155269.{{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)
  2. ↑ "The Pulitzer Prizes: Ex-AJC reporter wins book award". The Atlanta Journal-Constitution . April 21, 2009. Retrieved April 23, 2009.
  3. ↑ Blackmon 2008, pp. 404–405.
  4. ↑ "Douglas Blackmon on Slavery by Another Name". PBS. Archived from the original on December 30, 2013. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  5. ↑ Wurzer, Cathy (February 13, 2012). "'Slavery By Another Name' documentary has Minn. connection". Minnesota Public Radio. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  6. ↑ "Nonfiction". The Boston Globe. June 14, 2009. Archived from the original on April 9, 2016. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  7. ↑ Blackmon 2008, p. 3.
  8. ↑ Blackmon 2008, p. 10.
  9. ↑ Blackmon 2008, p. 39.
  10. ↑ Blackmon 2008, p. 53.
  11. 1 2 Blackmon 2008, pp. 377–78.
  12. ↑ Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877, 1965, p. 161
  13. ↑ Blackmon 2008, p. 402.
  14. ↑ "PBS explores Slavery by Another Name". PBS. June 9, 2011. Archived from the original on October 26, 2014. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  15. ↑ "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II". Book Marks. Retrieved February 17, 2024.
  16. ↑ Maslin, Janet (April 11, 2008). "Slavery By Another Name". The New York Times. Archived from the original on March 28, 2015. Retrieved July 7, 2013– via HighBeam Research.
  17. ↑ Pitts, Leonard (July 24, 2008). "Book details slavery by another name". Miami Herald. Archived from the original on March 28, 2015. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  18. ↑ Brundage, W. Fitzhugh (July 1, 2008). "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II". The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. Archived from the original on March 28, 2015. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  19. ↑ Vognar, Chris (June 1, 2008). "Lingering racism; Books examine post-Civil War racism and the life of Marcus Garvey". Sunday Gazette-Mail. Archived from the original on March 28, 2015. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  20. ↑ "Civil War didn't end slavery.(Spotlight)". Rocky Mountain News. April 4, 2008. Archived from the original on March 28, 2015. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  21. ↑ Smethurst, James (June 22, 2008). "After slavery, new system recreates old torments". The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on March 12, 2016. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  22. ↑ "2009 Pulitzer Prizes for Letters, Drama and Music". The New York Times. April 20, 2009. Archived from the original on June 8, 2022. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  23. 1 2 "A book ban overreaction". The Washington Post. October 3, 2011. Archived from the original on October 10, 2018. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  24. ↑ Campbell, Robertson (September 26, 2011). "Alabama Inmate Sues to Read Southern History Book". The New York Times. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  25. ↑ "Slavery by Another Name official website". PBS . May 23, 2012. Retrieved May 23, 2012.
  26. ↑ "Sundance Film Festival Film Guide". May 23, 2012. Archived from the original on July 10, 2012. Retrieved May 23, 2012.
  27. ↑ Genzliger, Neil (February 13, 2013). "Channel Surfing: 'Slavery by Another Name'". The New York Times. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  28. ↑ Fienberg, Daniel (January 24, 2011). "Sundance Review: 'Slavery By Another Name'". Hitfix. Retrieved July 7, 2013.
  29. ↑ "Documentary explores 'slavery by another name'". February 13, 2012. Retrieved August 9, 2016.
  30. ↑ The Loving Story. HBO. Retrieved August 27, 2016.
  31. ↑ "Welcome to Created Equal | Created Equal". Archived from the original on August 28, 2016. Retrieved August 9, 2016.

Bibliography

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.