Analysis of Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon

Slavery by Another Name reveals the grim reality that – contrary to popular belief about the abolition of slavery – African Americans were still subject to forced labor without compensation after The Civil War, despite having passed the 13th Amendment. Instead of freedom, they faced even worse animosity in the South and were the target of racially-charged legislation that kept them marginalized until World War II. The county criminal justice system in eight southern states funded itself by arresting black men for vagrancy and other misdemeanors that were applied only to African-Americans, assessing them a fine they couldn’t pay, and then selling their labor to companies that paid the fine and put the defendants to work in coal mines, quarries and other places where conditions were harsh, disease rampant and the death rate high. Guarded by bosses who used whips, “they were slaves in all but name.” Blackmon, who works for the Wall Street Journal, wanted to know what might be revealed if American corporations such as U.S. Steel were examined through the same lens of historical responsibility as the one being trained on German corporations who relied upon slave labor during WWII? More about that later.

This book of more than 400 pages reflects impressive research. Blackmon found a vast record of original documents describing the arrest, sale and delivery of tens of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms and factories. The victims were typically guilty of indigence and given a cruel sham of due process. “Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors and justices of the peace who were often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man – even a black child – was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged.” States discovered a source of steady revenue from selling or leasing convicts to corporations.

By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, every former confederate state except Virginia had adopted the practice of leasing black prisoners into commercial hands. But county prisoners soon far surpassed the number of men pressed into forced labor by the state. The number of arrests was not in response to crime rates, but with the demand for convict labor. “Increasingly, it was a system driven not by any goal of public protection against serious offenses, but purely to generate fees and claim bounties.” The companies were empowered to punish prisoners with no actual checks and balances. Conditions were brutal: nearly 20 percent of Alabama’s leased prisoners died in the first two years, with 35 percent mortality in the third year and 45 percent in the fourth. Before the Civil War, the slave owner who leased his property had an interest in how the slave was treated. After the war, the sheriff had no interest in their treatment nor in whether they even survived. Alongside the lease of convicts, another system grew under which debtors would agree to work for a white farmer without compensation. Black debtors agreed to this arrangement as preferable being convicted and sentenced to hard labor in a mine. The result was that black tenant farmers and share-croppers often returned as uncompensated convict laborers, subject to shackles and the lash, in the same fields they and their forebears had worked during slavery. In short, this new system served not only as a source of revenue but of control and intimidation of the freedmen to comply with a social order of white domination in counties where African Americans were the majority. Incredibly, the power structure tried to justify this cruel system by blaming the victims, claiming the lawless behavior of the freedmen required strict measures.

Alabama State inspectors sent to convict work camps in the 1870s always reported the convicts were being humanely treated. W.D. Lee, an Alabama inspector of convicts, gave a speech at the National Prison Congress in Cincinnati in 1890 where he defended conditions in the mines, calling all criticism “exaggerated” and “falsehoods.” He claimed that convicts actually enjoyed improved health! “I assert here, without fear of successful contradiction, that the negro convicts…are better housed, better fed, better clothed, and receive better medical care and treatment in sickness than do the majority of the same class, as free men, in their homes.” Whites were indifferent.

Reconstruction ended in 1877, and the Chicago Tribune expressed a common viewpoint: “The long controversy over the black man seems to have reached a finality.” Meanwhile, the SCOTUS emasculated civil rights laws, Jim Crow laws were gradually adopted requiring segregation, funding for black schools was slashed, and 1892 was the peak year for lynchings in the US with 250. By 1900, the right to vote had all but disappeared for African-Americans. Federal authorities during this era turned a blind eye to the shocking violation of basic human rights. The exception came during several years of Theodore Roosevelt’s administration when a local US attorney in Alabama was given permission to intervene. Though a handful of business owners were convicted, they paid fines and none went to prison. It was not until the US entry into WWII that the US DOJ again showed interest in the mistreatment of African-Americans. FDR recognized that the mistreatment of African-Americans would be used against the US by our enemies to show we didn’t practice the ideals of democracy we preached. He had Attorney General Francis Biddle issue a directive – five days after Pearl Harbor was attacked – urging US attorneys to reverse their long inaction on prosecuting slavery. The lingering persistence of slavery has been largely ignored by history; it conflicts with “the mythology most white Americans rely upon to explain our past and to embroider our present.” There is reluctance of most corporations and families to reopen the details of how they profited from the racial practices in the early 20th century. Those who inherited wealth at the expense of others aren’t eager to recognize how they benefited from their ancestors’ crimes. The notion of reparations is dismissed out of hand. The commercial sectors in this country, writes Blackmon, have never been held accountable for profiting from the revival of forced labor after the Civil War. Should they have any obligation to the descendants of the slave victims who did the labor without compensation?

Blackmon proposes that the era he studied be renamed: Instead of the Jim Crow era, it should be called the Age of Neoslavery. Jim Crow was the name used by a white actor’s minstrel performance, a caricature called Jim Crow. “Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery’s grip on US society – its intimate connections to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to millions of African Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end – can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.”

Works Cited

1. Blackmon, D. A. (2008). Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Anchor.
2. Blight, D. W. (2019). Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Simon & Schuster.
3. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The Souls of Black Folk. A.C. McClurg & Co.
4. Foner, E. (2010). Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
5. Jones, M. (2013). The Known World. Amistad Press.
6. Madden, K. P. (2018). Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African-American History In and Around Washington, D.C. Globe Pequot Press.
7. McPherson, J. M. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press.
8. Patterson, T. C. (2003). The Civil Rights Movement: Major Events and Legacies. Oxford University Press.
9. Rothman, A. S. (1971). The South and the Reconstruction of American Journalism. University of Illinois Press.
10. Trelease, A. W. (1971). White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction. Harper & Row.