Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Discover the Rage behind Reparations

First let me say: WOW!!!!! Even though I work fulltime and have a teenage son, I read a new book about every 10 days--typically legal mysteries. But a friend 'an attorney' recommended this book--I finished Sunday nite--about 10 days--and WOW! SO vivid and full of information--'At one point I wrote in the margin: 'Where was God?'. I thought I new a lot about slavery--but not enough about the slavery AFTER emancipation! And I'm Black! I wish I could speak to some of the slave owners--were they mentally ill? Did they REALLY believe Blacks were equal to animals or did they tell themselves that to justify their actions? Why so much abuse of a 'resource' you needed to carry out your work???!! AND HOW DID BLACKS SURVIVE????

6 out of 6 people found this review helpful.

One Explanation for the Condition of the African American Family in the South

This book is so powerful that I could not put it down. The research was meticulous and absorbing. As one with two degrees in history, I am very impressed with the books organization, originality, and perspective on the continued institution of slavery in the South until WWII.
The book does not sugarcoat any of the reality of what it was like to live in the South when African American men and women were declared "free" while the judicial system continued slavery and its many abuses.
When millions of African American husbands and fathers were torn away from their families and forced into Southern farms and industrial labor camps that were very similar WWII German prison camps, it is no wonder the families still suffer from the legacies of this judicial torture. The author makes the point time after time that African American's had economic worth as slaves because they could be traded, bred, and exploited for a life time. However, after they became "freeman," there was no need to treat them with any sense of dignity or value. Arrest, imprison, abuse, and kill as many as possible because these men and women no longer had ANY worth except for labor until they died. In many ways the American judicial system continues to enslave thousands of young men through the enforcement of drug laws that make no rational sense in a time of declining state budgets.
As the author stated, the South remains addicted to slavery and their are parts of the South in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia continue this proud tradition of having placed African Americans remaining in slavery. This reviewer recommends this book to anyone who is looking for why the African American family is today what it is and why it remain so until far into the future if we as a nation continue to fail to act on poverty in our nation.

4 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

Very revealing about the enslavement of Blacks between the Civil War and 1941

Motivated by the disappearance of Green Cottenham, Blackmon traces the re-enslavement of blacks after the Civil War and in spite of the Emancipation Proclamation. Initially, he contrasts the antebellum forms of slavery and leasing of slaves to other plantation owners or businesses to the post Civil War arrests (on basically trivial charges, at most misdemeanor charges) of blacks, and the payment of their fines and court costs by whites. The whites engage in 'contracts' with the black to pay off the debt incurred by fine or court cost. Often the 'benefactor' would then have the debtor re-arrested on another charge so the debtor could be kept enslaved. In other instances, prisoners arrested by local sheriffs and found guilty by local justices of the peace would then be leased to such businesses as Pratt Mines or Tennessee Iron, Coal and R.R.. The lease payment brought considerable money into the treasuries of Alabama (particularly), Mississippi and Georgia or cost-free labor to the iron and steel industry. Through either form, the black was re-enslaved.

This leasing often brought BRUTAL punishment-lengthy whippings, cruel chainings, even murder-when the slave was, for example, slow in producing enough coal or not obedient to the level desired by the white boss.

Even after service in World War I, blacks would return to find they were not entitled to the rights and privileges of free men.

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

Hard to put down, hard to pick up.

This author does us a favor by opening up something ugly and exposing it to the light through this book. I knew times were hard for our black citizens after the Civl War. I had no idea how bad things were in certain areas of the South. This book should open eyes and engender discussions. As I said in the title, once reading I found it hard to put the book down. But I also found it hard to pick up and continue on. He does not spare us details of the horrors of this era, but, indeed, they need to be told. I am glad the author is a Southerner which lends legitimacy to this incredible story. It is meticulouslyl researched and annotated. It is a book that Americans must read to fully understand America's past. I recommend it highly!

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

Must Read

Heart breaking story of the ways in which USA citizens treated non white society, which continues to this day in more subtle ways. I did not think of reparations as being needed until I read this book. This is a well written and researched history of how Jim Crow laws were inacted and accepted and linger in USA society.

2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.

Required Reading...

A powerful illustration of a time in U.S. history when the country's collective consciousness was slowly evolving, while Black Americans were being brutalized by a certain segment of White Americans who had no regard for the law or human decency.

As I read the book, I kept trying to understand why it was so important to these White Americans that the Black American victims confess to crimes that they did not commit, but then I realized that the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution officially abolished and prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude, "except as punishment for a crime." So, these immoral White Americans devised an unconscionable and diabolical scheme to unlawfully enslave and persecute their fellow citizens for profit. However, it was also White Americans who were defenders of the spirit of the law and championed the end of the tyrannical practice.

The book also raises the question, "Is it even possible for America to correct such a horrific past wrong?" A wrong that set Black Americans on a course of constantly having to overcome the remnants of such antebellum and postbellum thinking and practices.

The religious may even ask, "Where was God?" John Hill, a brutalized former slave, quoted a former Georgia State Senator, James M. Smith, as saying, "The Lord rule Heaven, but Jim Smith ruled the earth."

As the U.S. continues to move towards that more perfect union, it's important to remember what Edmund Burke stated, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." I highly recommend this laudable book to "everyone." I thank the author for having the courage to write such an unadulterated manuscript chronicling a most wretched period in U.S. history. It is a true expose'.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

A new, uplifting, concerning take on our view that slavery ended with Lincoln.

Douglas Blackmon takes America's Nightmare of Enslavement to Slavery and infuses it with even more shocking scenes of degradation, deprivation, and desecration of an entire group of Americans. Blackmon plunges us immediately into a tub of cold water to shock our systems... how could slavery possibly have been taking place in the United States for long years after the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. Shocking? Yes! Disturbing? Certainly! Disgusting? Absolutely!

We're taken on an almost 500 pages roller coaster ride from the heights of joy to the despair of enslavement. Because of duplicitous governments entities throughout the South... and North, freed slaves were subjected once again to the harsh realities of abject slavery. And all for the almighty dollar. They were placed in "work camps," but no semantic difference existed from the plantations they'd come from.

Blackmon's exhaustive research recounts through handwritten letters, county birth and property documents, and corporate financial records, the hell that White Americans subjected Negroes to for years into the 20th Century. He shows clearly the benefits received by large companies like US Steel at the expense of poor negroes who had been arrested for trumped up charges of vagrancy and the like. It's another shameful example of American injustice.

This book has been difficult to read, but necessary! Painful, yet somehow redemptive! I hope that people of all walks of life dig into it and ask themselves if this blind assent to injustice by the dominant culture could possibly take place in 21st Century America. Millions of Negro slaves probably never thought it could happen to them either.

They were wrong!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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