Academic

Blackmon on Convict Labor

By propertyprof

If you're by a television tonight, you'll want to check out Douglas Blackmon's interview with Tavis Smiley about his new book, Slavery By Another Name.  It's about convict labor.  Here's a description from the webpage for Slavery by Another Name.

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.

The neoslavery system exploited legal loopholes and federal policies which 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.

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 Corp.?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.

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.

I'm looking forward to reading it--and to seeing Doug at the Birmingham Public Library on May 13.  You can read the introduction here.  It's haunting.  But you know the best part for me?  It's partly about cemetery law.  And if you like this book, you may also enjoy John Sayles' movie Honeydripper, starring Danny Glover.

Alfred L. Brophy

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on May 01, 2008 (boomark / email).