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.
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.
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.
