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| Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II | 
 enlarge | Author: Douglas A. Blackmon
Publisher: Doubleday
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $17.04
You Save: $12.91 (43%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (44 reviews)
Sales Rank: 19044
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 480
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.5 x 1.7
ISBN: 0385506252
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.896073
EAN: 9780385506250
ASIN: 0385506252
Publication Date: March 25, 2008
Release Date: March 25, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 41-44 of 44 | | « PREV 1 ... | | |
No Hiding Place April 10, 2008
13 out of 13 found this review helpful
If nothing else, Mr. Blackmon should be seriously considered for a Pulitzer Prize with his publication of "Slavery by Another Name." He has not only written a MUST read book for all Americans, but he has seriously altered the way we must look at American history. Mr. Blackmon's work cuts through that old hiding place for so many Americans: "Slavery was a loooooong time ago, so I couldn't have had anything to do with it." Blackmon's book puts modern day slavery well within the lifetimes of a great many living Americans and holds us all responsible for its existence in one way or another. There were those who participated and benefitted directly, and there were those who benefitted by never objecting though they knew it was going on, and there is just the general public who all benefitted from the underpaid labors of slaves, not prior to the Civil War, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For those who do not understand the anger of black Americans feel for white Americans, they need only to step into the pages of this incredible book and the reason for that anger will become instantly clear. Actually what would not make sense would be for black Americans to not be angry - that would indicate that they were crazy. Blackmon's book represents a prodigious amount of research, the careful, precise, deep kind of research that is hard to refute; he has uncovered facts about a situation that cannot be denied. Blackmon's book should not only be required reading in every American history course, it should be a text book in most. I worry about Mr. Blackmon personally as I wonder how he could roam around in this kind of material without himself becoming deeply depressed. Albeit he is an experienced journalist probably able to shake off the horrors of any situation he writes about, but still, this is no ordinary situation, with no ordinary facts. This is a story that no doubt has changed Mr. Blackmon himself, and I daresay that it will change everyone who reads it. And I suggest that every person even mildly interested in altering the course of this country put Mr. Blackmon's book on their MUST read list, and as they do they should keep in mind the words of George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
A Must Read April 5, 2008
21 out of 24 found this review helpful
In 1932 two movies came out of Hollywood:
Paul Muni in "I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang"
and
Richard Barthelmess (also Bette Davis as a blond): "Cabin in the Cotton".
After the Production Code, fomented by the Catholic Church, gained bite even these stories --- less than half-truths though they were -- disappeared as Hollywood followed the revisionist money-making pseudo-history of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" with "Jezebel" and "Gone with the Wind" (to name only the best known) --- plangant melodramas of the "cavalier culture" of the "Old South."
It has been that revisionist history that has indoctrinated millions of Americans and millions of others throughout the world.
Now, to paraphrase Ms. Davis in "Jezebel": "It's 2008, pumkin! 2008!!" and Douglas Blackmon, the Wall Street Journal's Alanta Bureau Chief (who would have supposed? -- well, their news reporting has always far outshined their editorial page, Mr. Murdoch) at last pulls back the veil.
Read it and, if you have one ounce of humanity, you will weep, perhaps literally.
You will realize that those old "critical" films ("I Am a Fugitive" and Muni were nominated for Academy Awards -- they both lost; Ms. Davis won for "Jezebel" and you know about "Gone with...") actually hid the most bitter truth of the situation. You may also understand why many African Americans are bitter and angry.
This book, although not written by a professional historian, is well researched, thoroughly documented (to the extent documentation was not destroyed or buried, like the graves of the "leased" laborers), and engagingly written. Most important, Mr. Blackmon does not stop with a mere description of the brutal system of "convict" leasing which permeated Southern industry until World War II. He relates it to the entire system of repression, oppression, and degredation of African Americans - Jim Crow, lynching (averging one every ten days from 1880 to 1940), and corruption - and the legal, political, and public denial of the same - which permeated U.S. culture at the time -- and continues to this day.
If you are like me, you will not be able to read this book in one sitting. It is too gut-wrenching --- whether you are white or black.
Nevertheless, it will be one of the most important books you will ever read. Unfortunately, it will probably not sell as many copies as "Gone with the Wind" nor is it likely that even "Indy" moviemakers will put the story of Green Cottinham on film. More's the pity.
An exceedingly important book for all Americans March 31, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
"The Wall Street Journal" has been running adaptations of this powerful, well researched history written by its Atlanta Bureau Chief, Douglas A. Blackmon. The first extract chronicles how companies owned by these two men used forced labor to help rebuild Atlanta -- a practice that was widespread through the South.
"Between the Emancipation Proclamation and the beginning of World War II, millions of African-Americans were compelled into or lived under the shadow of the South's new forms of coerced labor. Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands were arbitrarily detained, hit with high fines and charged with the costs of their arrests. With no means to pay such debts, prisoners were sold into coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroad construction crews and plantations. Others were simply seized by southern landowners and pressed into years of involuntary servitude. At the turn of the 20th century, at least 3,464 African-American men and 130 women lived in forced labor camps in Georgia, according to a 1905 report by the federal Commissioner of Labor."
In 1908 a commission held weeks of hearings into the state's system of leasing prisoners to private contractors. "Witness after witness -- ranging from former guards to legislators to freed slaves -- gave vivid accounts of the system's brutalities. Wraithlike men infected with tuberculosis were left to die on the floor of a storage shed at a farm near Milledgeville. Laborers who attempted escape from the Muscogee Brick Co. were welded into ankle shackles with three-inch-long spikes turned inward -- to make it impossibly painful to run again. Guards everywhere were routinely drunk and physically abusive." Many witnesses testified in particular about practices at Chattahoochee Brick owned by a very wealthy and prominent citizen of Atlanta.
A special session of the state Legislature authorized a public referendum on the fate of the system. Georgia's nearly all-white electorate voted by a 2-to-1 margin to abolish the system in March 1909. Without prison labor, business collapsed at many businesses, including Chattahoochee Brick. Production fell by nearly 50% in the next year. Total profit dwindled to less than $13,000.
A second extract describes the effect of World War II on the system. States no longer leased convicts; "now, the practice was mainly carried out through informal arrangements with city and county courts. Abusive sharecropping arrangements and the peonage system -- which allowed farmers to use bogus debts and the threat of violence to keep workers on their land indefinitely -- hung over millions of African-Americans."
Roosevelt worried that the mistreatment of blacks would be used in propaganda by Japan and Germany to undercut support for the war by African-Americans. Attorney General Francis Biddle shared the president's concerns with his top assistants. "Mr. Biddle was informed that federal policy had long been to cede virtually all allegations of slavery to local jurisdiction -- effectively guaranteeing they would never be prosecuted. Mr. Biddle, who hailed from an elite Northern family in Philadelphia, was shocked."
On December 12, 1941, Mr. Biddle issued Circular No. 3591 to all federal prosecutors acknowledging the history of unwritten federal policy to ignore most reports of involuntary servitude. "It is the purpose of these instructions to direct the attention of the United States Attorneys to the possibilities of successful prosecutions stemming from alleged peonage complaints which have heretofore been considered inadequate to invoke federal prosecution." Blackmon traces the course of the prosecutions, many of them successful, some over the course of the war. He also describes the resistance of many prosecutors, as well as J. Edgar Hoover, to the new policy.
Blackmon writes that he has examined court records over a number of years that document the agreements between sheriffs and other officials describing these practices. He also discusses The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 by Peters Daniels which was based on Justice Department files describing the unlawful system of peonage. Sharecroppers, in particular, would be advanced money to grow a crop, and income from the crop would be divided. Daniels showed that millions remained in debt for years; somehow the tenants's shares were never enough to pay off the debts.
Blackmon makes a compelling case that leasing prisoners and unlawful peonage (as well as poll taxes and voter intimidation) were part of a very complicated system "that was designed to intimidate the millions of black people living in the South right up until the verge of World War II."
Blackmon's most powerful passages deal with real people caught up in the system. He argued during an interview on NPR that slaves before the Civil War had great value to their owners; there was a strong economic incentive to at least ensure that slaves survived. Under the "neo-slavery practices" after the Civil War, "what emerged was a kind of brutally efficient, economic rationale which viewed these workers more as equipment than as humans. The cost of acquiring them was so small that it was much more economic for these companies and landowners to work them as hard as possible even if that meant working them to death because they were easily and inexpensively replaced."
This book is very hard to read. I believe it is essential to do so to truly understand American history.
***
Reviewer's Disclosure: I worked on various Civil Rights matters in Mississippi between 1961 and 1970 as a law student and later as young lawyer.
Robert C. Ross
Historic Achievement Toward Greater Insight and Reconciliation March 29, 2008
36 out of 38 found this review helpful
In what may well be one of the most important works in non-fiction to emerge in the 21st Century, investigative journalist, Douglas Blackmon, has authored a compelling and compassionate examination of slavery's evolution, practice and influence reaching far into the 20th Century. Blackmon's, Slavery by Another Name, is certainly a prizeworthy study by a writer whose acumen for the highest in journalistic standards combined with an unusual gift for storytelling makes this historic work both enlightening and inspiring.
As an African American (bi-racial Black/White) I can attest to the facts and stories Mr. Blackmon presents, as told to me by my father who only upon his deathbed, felt safe enough to reveal. Growing up in Jasper Texas in the 1920's, he was picking cotton at age 7 and driving tractors at age 9. The atmosphere for Blacks was a living holocaust, where my father witnessed the lynching of his boyhood friend at age 13, where oppression was a daily experience for Blacks; even in the most simple terms of human interaction, where making eye-contact when addressing Whites was considered untenable and subject to harsh retribution.
Indeed, Mr. Blackmon goes far beyond these traditional understandings of racial practices, and brings new, deeper knowledge of how slavery had merely been retooled to accommodate the unforeseen realities of emancipation, allowing it to flourish for many more decades in what Blackmon calls the "Age of Neoslavery".
Resulting from the recent history-making speech on race by Presidential hopeful, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, there is huge public interest in reaching a more comprehensive understanding of race relations in our nation. The fact is, public response to Sen. Obama's speech has uncapped an overwhelming outpouring of public interest, writings, and dialogue.
Mr. Blackmon had a similar experience back in 2001, when his article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on how U.S. Steel Corp. relied on the forced labor of Blacks. This too received massive public response expressing appreciation and sincere interest to learn more. Hence, after 7 years of exhaustive research and interviews, Slavery by Another Name arrives at a time our nation, facing a historic general election, is contemplating race as never before. And Mr. Blackmon's pioneering work is helping us to break new ground toward a path of greater insight and reconciliation.
- Ellison Horne
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