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The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
Doubleday
April 2008
On Sale: March 25, 2008
480 pages
ISBN: 0385506252
EAN: 9780385506250
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In this groundbreaking historical exposé, 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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