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Title: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
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Manufacturer: Doubleday
List Price: $29.95
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| Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Doubleday The Horror of Horrors | I Just finished Slavery by Another Name. I had known about the black code for several years, but not the selling of free black people. I hate the Al Sharptons of the world or black people that defend criminals that blame their crime on racism. They disrespect all these ghosts of the past that suffered at the hands of brutal savage souls.
But one thing has changed for me: Although I never called anyone in my life a nigger, I thought it. After reading your book, I will never allow that thought to come to the surface again.
That photo of the man tied up on the ground felt his short life of suffering would have no meaning, but he was wrong, after 100 years we look at him and feel his pain and are influenced by his image forever. I wish I could embrace him and give him the love and respect every creature deserves.
| | Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Doubleday Good History but Still lacking! | I found this book to be very interesting but lacking in that there was no context provided for the problem. The author contends that in the period after the Civil War blacks were Re-Enslaved. He does a commendable job of showing how the black community was systematically stripped of its rights and abandoned by the government after the Civil War. He also does an exemplary job showing how abuses in the criminal justice system of the south allowed for blacks to be sentenced to virtual slavery.
Where the book fails though is in showing that this was an re-enslavement of civil war blacks. It ignores the wholesale black migration of blacks to the north in the years before and during WWI which would contradict the statements that blacks could be arrested for any crime an officer saw fit. The author ignores whites sentenced to similar terms in jail and conditions which was wide spread in the south. Worst of all, the book lacks any context. We are lead to believe that because it happened in these places, it happened everywhere.
A good book, just not a great one! | | Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Doubleday slavery by Another Name | | Excellent update to history that is rarely known. Should be in every school and public library. | | Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Doubleday Another Missing Chapter in American History | 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 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. | | Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Doubleday Necessary reading, harrowing | | Slavery By Another Name is painful to read. It is cleanly written, for the most part, but the continuation of virtual slavery in the US South that only began to recede with the advent of WW2 makes it grim slogging. But slog away, dear reader, because you need to know what is in this book, which , in my opinion, deserves and will receive a number of literary and historical awards this year. | | Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Doubleday Product Description | In this groundbreaking historical exposé, 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.
Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay these ostensible “debts,” prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of “free” black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.
The neoslavery system exploited legal loopholes and federal policies that discouraged prosecution of whites for continuing to hold black workers against their wills. As it poured millions of dollars into southern government treasuries, the new slavery also became a key instrument in the terrorization of African Americans seeking full participation in the U.S. political system.
Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Slavery by Another Name 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. It also reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II.
Slavery by Another Name is a moving, sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today. |
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