Slavery By Another Name
A Pulitzer-winning author reveals the little-known postbellum reinvention of forced labor
MADISON, NJ--Every American school child is taught that Abraham Lincoln ended slavery, yet none learns that hundreds of thousands of African-American men in the rural South were later forced into a brutal and shameful system of “neo-slavery” for private industry, author Douglas A. Blackmon told a rapt audience at Drew on October 28, 2009.
“They were slaves in all but name. It’s a story that few Americans know, understand, or have heard of,” said Blackmon, a journalist with the Wall Street Journal in Atlanta whose book, Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
The book is an outgrowth of an article Blackmon wrote detailing how Alabama authorities collaborated with U.S. Steel to create a work force of prison laborers. County sheriffs arrested indigent black men on trumped-up charges and, when they could not pay fines, leased them to railroads, farms and mines for the duration of their sentences. Chained at night, guarded by whipping bosses by day, they worked under horrific, sometimes fatal conditions.
“This was a deliberate regime of coercion, invented in the South and abided by in the North. And, perhaps most stunningly, no one in America cared,” he said. Until 1941 the U. S. Department of Justice had a policy of not investigating allegations of slavery in the South.
Blackmon traveled from one county courthouse to another in search of original arrest records. He went through 30,000 pages of documents at the National Archives. He pondered his own story—born in the Mississippi Delta in 1965, he was one of few whites in his hometown’s newly integrated schools—and pored over history books. A horrifying chapter of black American life emerged.
“If we truly believe our country should have a shared vision, then we have to be brutally honest about the past,” he said. “This is the story of all of us. We must understand it in order to understand ourselves.”
###
Posted: November 2, 2009
