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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%)
Buy New/Used from $13.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  (44 reviews)
Sales Rank: 21581
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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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
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.
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?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.
The neoslavery system exploited legal loopholes and federal policies that 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.
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 39 more reviews...
The American Gulag December 7, 2008
The comparison between the American and Russian use of forced labor for social control and development in a "backward" economy is obvious, and was so even in the 19th century with the publication of J. C. Powell's "The American Siberia" in 1891, detailing prisoner exploitation in Florida's convict lease system. Author Blackmon has collected and collated such widely-scattered documentation of this era into a comprehensive treatment. In doing so he has not exactly broken new ground, but has opened a half-shut door for a new generation of readers.
Mr. Blackmon focuses on race as the decisive factor in retaining forced labor in America, and so it was in the South. As one reviewer has stated, however, poor Southern whites could be caught up in this system, especially in the border South, and varieties of it were found in some northern and western states whose statutes contained similar, if not so rigorously-enforced statutes. But he has shown that the nexus of forced labor practices - convict labor, sharecropping, peonage - were all attempts to recreate the social and economic subjection of freed blacks without technical violation of the 13th Amendment.
But Russian and Soviet practice demonstrate, however, that racial distinctions are not necessary in creating (or recreating) servitude. Like the American South Russia also had a forced labor system, in which poor "freedmen" were trapped into convict labor through the 19th and early 20th century. Here, class was as great a beating stick as race when it came to applying social control to a "backward" and "lawless" and "ignorant" peasantry. The practice was, of course, continued on an industrial scale in the Soviet era, but here too there is analogy to the use of convict labor by corporate capitalism in mines, construction, and railroads in the postbellum South. It is precisely because of this all-too-apparent analogy that cold war partisans will object to Mr. Blackmon's book. Habits of servitude die hard in a culture once they've taken root.
The Soviet gulag was disbanded in the 1950s largely because it was no longer cost-effective, and this also applies to the use of forced Southern labor. Whether sharecropping, peonage, or penal farming, such human-intensive use of unskilled labor was seen as a drain on development by the mid-century. This was ultimately more important in ending the American "new" slave system than the legislative action of enlightened Rooseveltian law enforcement, as Mr. Blackman maintains in his book's conclusion. As Blackmom himself should know from his study of how this system was fostered and ignored at all levels of government, sentiment played no role in it whatsoever, and that included its abolition as well as its creation.
A timely and worthwhile book, even with my criticisms and reservations. Read it, and learn what you're not supposed to know.
amazing November 11, 2008
Everyone should read this book. It is a well-written account of American history and oppression that is often left out of textbooks and shamefully continues today through poverty.
 Good conditon but took long to get here November 5, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book was in good/new condition but it took forever to get here. Even though the receiving dates was two weeks it got here on the second to last day so if you need this book for class order it from someone else who guarantees faster shipping.
Only one small complaint October 2, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I could not put this book down. After I finished I went on to read about white slavery just so that I had a well rounded idea of what was going on during this time. The only small complaint I have is that when authors talk about chattel slavery they all tend to group African Americans together as in "when African Americans got the right to vote" etc. This needs to be more specific if we are ever to really have a grasp of that history. African American men got the "right to vote" in 1850, Women as a group in 1920. I had to pen in "men" and "male" throughout my copy of this book for the next reader to remember white/black male/female all have specific histories in this country. But other than that, I could not put it down.
Very quick delivery! September 16, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
Every time I order books directly from Amazon it arrives within three days, and I love that.
Thanks Amazon!
Karyn
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