The book publishing industry is flourishing. The insatiable human desire for knowledge, titillation, intrigue and mystery is insatiable. The landscape of offerings is immense. Something is available to feed the most varied of interests.
A few"new books" have been recently published pertaining to the "historic" American governmental policy and societal executed implementation of shall we say "black containment and maximization."
The gargantuan American political and social policy complicity of managing and controlling the negro-mulatto-black-african-american economic presence is reflected in these new-old-same-old story books.
"Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files"
"Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers"
"Slavery by Another Name"
and even a recent documentary Who Kept Slavery in America a Secret in the 20th Century? The Untold Story: 20th Century Slavery" challenge inquiring minds.
Can we embrace the African Sankofa paradigm of looking backing and forwards at the same time in order to create an intelligent future?
What if any is the impact of historical economic legacies and generational wealth building implosion?
Voices of Emancipation By Donald R. Shaffer and Elizabeth Regosin, seeks to recover the lives and words of former slaves using the case files of the U.S. Pension Bureau, which administered a huge pension system for Union veterans and their
survivors in the decades following the Civil War. The files contain an
invaluable, first-hand perspective of slavery, emancipation, black
military service, and freedom. Moreover, as Pension Bureau examiners
began interviewing black Union veterans and their families shortly after
the Civil War, the files are arguably among the earliest sources of
ex-slaves reflecting on their lives, occurring decades before
better-known WPA Slave Narratives of the 1930s took place.
Voices of Emancipation explores the words of former slaves topically, beginning
with recollections of slavery, moving on to experiences of military
service in the Civil War, the transition to freedom, and finally to
reflections on marriage and family before and after emancipation. It has
an introduction that places the pension files in context and presents
the themes of the book, and historical commentary interwoven throughout
the excerpts of the interviews themselves.
Richard S. Newman, Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen,
the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers
Born a slave in colonial Philadelphia, Allen secured his freedom during
the American Revolution, and went on to become one of the leading black
activists before the Civil War. Allen's list of achievements includes
forming the AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, publishing the
first African American eulogy for George Washington, and convening the
first national convention of black reformers. Allen's work went on to
influence nearly every black leader of the nineteenth century, from
Douglass to Dubois.
Slavery by Another Name:
The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II
Author: Douglas A. Blackmon
The Age of Neo-Slavery
In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—when a cynical new form of slavery was resurrected from the ashes of the Civil War and re-imposed on hundreds of thousands of African-Americans until 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, brick-yards, 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.
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.
Who Kept Slavery in America a Secret in the 20th Century?
"The Untold Story: 20th Century Slavery"
- When did slavery in America end? The American history books teach us that enslaved Blacks in the United States of America celebrated their freedom in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln freed us by enacting the Emancipation Proclamation.
But what if--just if--America's grips on slavery never loosen? What if slavery continued to be reality for African Americans in sixteen states and sixteen counties throughout Mississippi, from Kosciusko, MS the childhood hometown of Oprah Winfrey to the hometown of Morgan Freeman, Clarksdale, MS down to the lonely roads of Money, MS where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955.
Antoinette Harrell
What if the same hunger for a slave economy still nourished America's soils and perverted Southern appetite as it feast along the mightiest rivers.
Deep in the bowels of America's richest agricultural belt behind a million cotton bolt,lived the 20th century masters and African Americans, who were still under the whips and flogging of the master and overseers. Still working from sun up to sun down, who dares to utter the word "slavery," yet lived its reality each and every backbreaking day.
So why don't you know anything about slavery in the 20th Century. The U.S. Government knew, the FBI knew, the NAACP knew, Governor Earl Brewer of Mississippi knew, President Calvin Coolidge, President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew, local sheriffs, elected officials knew, and the Supreme Court knew.
You didn't know because the truth of this American nightmare--for those who lived it--has been buried in an unnamed darkness in dusty courthouse attics and the National Archives "Department of Justice" files in Washington, D.C.
Documentary film maker, writer and producer Antoinette Harrell have dedicated the last ten years of my life exposing the truth and facts. Harrell has researched through thousands of documents housed in the National Archives and traveled throughout Mississippi, searching through criminal and civil documents as it relates to peonage "Involuntary Servitude" a condition of slavery.
Antoinette Harrell has unearthed peonage research documents. Hear for example former slave Mae Louise Miller recount her personal experience as a slave in the 20th Century during the '40s, '50s, '60s and her escape from slavery in 1963.
Bill Moyers Interview: 'Slavery by Another Name'
June 20, 2008
BILL MOYERS: That was just a portion of the film. When
"Traces of the Trade" airs on P.O.V. next week, Katrina
Browne and several of her kinfolk follow the path of
those ships to the West Coast of Africa, on to Cuba,
where the DeWolfs owned a huge slave plantation, and
then back again to new England, where an orderly economy
run by pious, church-going people prospered from their
bargain with the devil. You'll hear those modern DeWolfs
struggling to come to terms with what they've learned
about their "crazy partnership" with silence between the
present and the past. Denial of course was not unique to
the DeWolf family. Every time I walked downtown where I
grew up in Texas, I passed the statue of Johnny Reb,
facing east toward Richmond, the capitol of the
Confederacy, reminding us of the bravery of gallant men
who fought and died to protect a way of life .
Tragically, it was a way of life built around slavery.
BILL MOYERS: At one time there were thousands of slaves
in our county. And after Richmond fell to Union troops,
my home town became, briefly, the military headquarters
of the Confederacy. But in twelve years of public
schools I cannot remember one of the teachers I deeply
cherished describe slavery for what it was. Nor did
they, or anyone I knew, talk about how our town's dark
and tortured past in restoring white supremacy after the
Civil War, prevented the emancipated slaves from
realizing the freedom they had been promised. Across the
South, from Texas and Louisiana to the Carolinas,
thousands of freed black Americans simply were arrested,
often on trumped up charges, and coerced into forced
labor. And that persisted right up into the 1940s, when
I was still a boy.
BILL MOYERS: Look at these pictures. Those photographs
are from one of the most stunning new books you'll read
this year, Slavery by Another Name. The author is
Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall
Street Journal. His articles on race, wealth and other
issues have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes four
times. His reporting on U.S.Steel and the company's use
of forced labor was included in the 2003 edition of Best
Business Stories, and his contribution to the Journal's
coverage of Hurricane Katrina received a Special
Headliner Award in 2006. Welcome.
This is truly the most remarkable piece of reporting I
have read in a long time. I honestly cannot recommend it
highly enough. What you report is that no sooner did the
slave owners, businessmen of the South, lose the Civil
War, then they turned around, and in complicity with
state and local governments and industry, reinvented
slavery by another name. And what was the result?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, the result was that by the time
you got to the end of the 19th century, 25 or 30 years
after the Civil War, the generation of slaves who'd been
freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the
constitutional amendments that ended slavery legally
this generation of people, who experienced authentic
freedom in many respects tough life, difficult hard
lives after the Civil War but real freedom, in which
they voted, they participated in government.
BILL MOYERS: They farmed?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They farmed. They carved out
independent lives. But then, this terrible shadow began
to fall back across black life in America, that
effectively re-enslaved enormous numbers of people. And
what that was all about, what that was rooted in, was
that the southern economic, and in a way, the American
economy, was addicted to slavery, was addicted to forced
labor. And the South could not resurrect itself.
And so, there was this incredible economic imperative to
bring back coerced labor. And they did, on a huge scale.
BILL MOYERS: You said they did it by criminalizing black
life.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and that was that was a charade.
But the way that happened was that, of course, before
the Civil War, there were Slave Codes. There were laws
that governed the behavior of slaves. And that was the
basis of laws, for instance, that made it where a slave
had to have a written pass to leave their plantation and
travel on an open road.
Well, immediately after the Civil War, all the southern
states adopted a new set of laws that were then called
Black Codes. And they essentially attempted to recreate
the Slave Codes. Well, those that was such an obvious
effort to recreate slavery, that the Union military
leadership that was still in the South, overruled all of
that. Still, that didn't work. And by the time you get
to the end of Reconstruction, all the southern
legislatures have gone back and passed laws that aren't
called Black Codes, but essentially criminalized a whole
array of activities, that it was impossible for a poor
black farmer to avoid encountering in some way.
BILL MOYERS: Such as?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Vagrancy. So, vagrancy was a law that
essentially, it simply, you were breaking the law if you
couldn't prove at any given moment that you were
employed. Well, in a world in which there were no pay
stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The
only way you could prove employment was if some man who
owned land would vouch for you and say, he works for me.
And of course, none of these laws said it only applies
to black people. But overwhelmingly, they were only
enforced against black people. And many times, thousands
of times I believe, you had young black men who
attempted to do that. They ended up being arrested and
returned to the original farmer where they worked in
chains, not even a free worker, but as a slave.
BILL MOYERS: And the result, as you write, thousands of
black men were arrested, charged with whatever, jailed,
and then sold to plantations, railroads, mills, lumber
camps and factories in the deep South. And this went on,
you say, right up to World War II?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And it was everywhere in the South.
These forced labor camps were all over the place. The
records that still survive, buried in courthouses all
over the South, make it abundantly clear that thousands
and thousands of African-Americans were arrested on
completely specious claims, made up stuff, and then,
purely because of this economic need and the ability of
sheriffs and constables and others to make money off
arresting them, and that providing them to these
commercial enterprises, and being paid for that.
BILL MOYERS: You have a photograph in here I have
literally not been able to get this photograph out of my
mind since I saw it the first time several weeks ago,
when I first got your book. It's a photograph of an
unnamed prisoner tied around a pickaxe for punishment in
a Georgia labor camp. It was photographed some time
around 1932, which this is hard to believe was two years
before I was born.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, that picture was taken by a
journalist named John Spivak, who took an astonishing
series of pictures in these forced labor camps in
Georgia in the 1930s. He got access to the prison system
of Georgia and these forced labor encampments, which
were scattered all over the place. Some of them were way
out in the deep woods. There were turpentine camps. Some
of them were mining camps. All incredibly harsh, brutal
work. He got access to these as a journalist, in part,
because the officials of Georgia had no particular shame
in what was happening.
BILL MOYERS: That's a surprising thing.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and but what the picture also
demonstrates was the level of violence and brutality,
the venality of things that were done. And so, this kind
of physical torture went on, on a huge scale. People
were whipped, starved. They went without clothing. There
were work camps where people reported that they would
arrive looking for a lost family member, and they would
arrive at a sawmill or a lumber camp where the men were
working as slaves naked, chained, you know, whipped. It
was it's just astonishing, the level of brutality.
BILL MOYERS: You have a story in here of a young man who
a teenager who spilled or poured coffee on the hog of
the farmer he was working for. He was stripped,
stretched across a barrel, and flogged 69 times with a
leather strap. And he died a week later. But that's not
a unique story in this book.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: No, that was incredibly common. And
there were on the there were thousands and thousands of
people who died under these circumstances over the span
of the period that I write about in the book. And over
and over again, it was from disease and malnutrition,
and from outright homicide and physical abuse.
BILL MOYERS: You give voice to a young man long dead,
whose voice would never had been heard, had you not
discovered it, resurrected it, and presented it. He's
the chief character in this book. Green Cottenham, is
that is.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Yes, that's right.
BILL MOYERS: Tell me about Green Cottenham.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Green Cottenham was a man in the 1880s
born to a mother and a father who, both of whom had been
slaves, who were emancipated at the end of the Civil
War. Imagine, a young man and a young woman who've just
been freed from slavery. And now they have the
opportunity to break away from the plantations where
they'd been held, begin a new life. And so, they do.
They marry. They have many children. Green Cottenham is
the last of them.
He's born in the 1880s, just as this terrible curtain of
hostility and oppression is beginning to really creep
across all of black life in the South. And by the time
he becomes an adult, in the first years of the 20th
century, the worst forces of the efforts to re-enslave
black Americans are in full power across the South. And
in the North, the allies, the white allies of the freed
slaves, have abandoned them. And so, right at the before
of the 20th century, whites all across America have
essentially reached this new consensus that slavery
shouldn't be brought back. But if African-Americans are
returned to a state of absolute servility, that's okay.
And Green Cottenham becomes an adult at exactly that
moment. And then, in 1908, in the spring of 1908, he's
arrested, standing outside a train station in a little
town in Alabama. The officer who arrested him couldn't
remember what the charge was by the time he brought him
in front of the judge. So he's conveniently convicted of
a different crime than the one he was originally picked
up for. He ends up being sold three days later, with
another group of black men, into a coal mine outside of
Birmingham. And he survives there several months, and
then dies under terrible circumstances.
BILL MOYERS: You write, 45 years after Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation, Cottenham was one of
thousands of men working like a slave in these
coalmines. Slope 12, you call it.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Slope number 12.
BILL MOYERS: What was slope number 12?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Slope number 12 was a huge mine on the
outskirts of Birmingham, part of a maze of mines.
Birmingham is the fastest growing city in the country.
Huge amounts of wealth and investment are pouring into
the place.
But there's this again, this need for forced labor. And
the very men, the very entrepreneurs who, just before
the Civil War, were experimenting with a kind of
industrial slavery, using slaves in factories and
foundries, and had begun to realize, hey, this works
just as well as slaves out on the farm.
The very same men who were doing that in the 1850s, come
back in the 1870s and begin to reinstitute the same form
of slavery. And Green Cottenham is one of the men, one
of the many thousands of men who were sucked into the
process, and then lived under these terribly brutalizing
circumstances, this place that was filled with disease
and malnutrition. And he dies there under terrible,
terrible circumstances.
BILL MOYERS: And you found the sunken graves five miles
from downtown Birmingham?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It's just miles away. In fact there
are just two places there, because all of these mines
now are abandoned. Everything is overgrown. There are
almost no signs of human activity, except that if you
dig deep into the woods, grown over there, you begin to
see, if you get the light just right, hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of depressions where these bodies
were buried.
BILL MOYERS: You say that Atlanta, where you live now,
which used to proclaim itself the finest city in the
South, was built on the broken backs of re-enslaved
black men.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: That's right. When I started off
writing the book, I began to realize the degree to which
this form of enslavement had metastasized across the
South, and that Atlanta was one of many places where the
economy that created the modern city, was one that
relied very significantly on this form of coerced labor.
And some of the most prominent families and individuals
in the in the creation of the modern Atlanta, their
fortunes originated from the use of this practice. And
the most dramatic example of that was a brick factory on
the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century,
was producing hundreds of thousands of bricks every
day.The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of
those bricks. The factory was operated entirely with
forced workers. And almost 100 percent black forced
workers. There were even times that on Sunday
afternoons, a kind of old-fashioned slave auction would
happen, where a white man who controlled black workers
would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse trade with
the guards at Chattahoochee Brick, trading one man for
another, or two men. And-
BILL MOYERS: And yet, slavery was illegal?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It had been illegal for 40 years. And
this is a really important thing to me. I was stunned
when I realized that because the city of Atlanta bought
these millions and millions of bricks, well, those are
the bricks that paved the downtown streets of Atlanta.
And those bricks are still there. And so these are the
bricks that we stand on.
BILL MOYERS: Didn't this economic machine that was built
upon forced labor, didn't these Black Codes, the way
that black life was criminalized, didn't this put
African-Americans at a terrific economic disadvantage
then and now?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Absolutely. The results of those laws
and the results of particularly enforcing them with such
brutality through this forced labor system, the result
of that was that African-Americans thousands and
thousands of them worked for years and years of their
lives with no compensation whatsoever, no ability to end
up buying property and enjoying the mechanisms of
accumulating wealth in the way that white Americans did.
This was a part of denying black Americans access to
education, denying black Americans access to basic
infrastructure, like paved roads, the sorts of things
that made it possible for white farmers to become
successful.
And so, yes, this whole regime of the Black Codes, the
way that they were enforced, the physical intimidation
and racial violence that went on, all of these were
facets of the same coin that made it incredibly less
likely that African-Americans would emerge out of
poverty in the way that millions of white Americans did
at the same time.
BILL MOYERS: How is it, you and I both Southerners, how
is it we could grow up right after this era, and be so
unaware of what had just happened to our part of the
country?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there are a lot of
explanations for that. The biggest one is simply that
this is a history that we haven't wanted to know as a
country. We've engaged in a in a kind of collective
amnesia about this, particularly about the severity of
it.
And the official history of this time, the conventional
history tended to minimize the severity of the things
that were done again and again and again, and to focus
instead, on the idea, on a lot of false mythologies.
Like, this idea that freed slaves after emancipation
became lawless and sort of went wild, and thievery, and
all sorts of crimes being committed by African-Americans
right after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. But
when you go back, as I did, and look at the arrest
records from that period of time, there's just no
foundation for that. And the reality was there was
hardly any crime at all. And huge numbers of people were
being arrested on these specious charges, so they could
be forced back into labor.
BILL MOYERS: Another reason -- I just think, as you talk
-- another reason is that anybody who raised these
allegations or charges, or wrote about them when I was
growing up, were dismissed as Communists. If it had been
from The Wall Street Journal, it might have been a
different take.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there's some truth to
that. Anyone who tried to raise these sorts of questions
was at risk of complete excoriation among other white
Southerners. But that's also what's remarkable about the
present moment. And one of the things I've discovered in
the course of talking about the book with people is that
there's an openness to a conversation about these things
that I think didn't exist even ten or 15 years ago.
BILL MOYERS: What has been the response to it? Americans
don't like to confront these pictures, these stories.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They don't. But over and over and over
again I've encountered people who've read the book, who
e-mailed me, or they come up to me after I talk about it
somewhere, particularly African-Americans, who African-
Americans know this story in their hearts. They may not
know the facts. They may not know exactly what the scale
of things were. But they know in their hearts that this
is what happened. And so, people come up to me and say,
"Gosh, the story that my grandmother used to tell before
she died 20 years ago, I never believed it. Because she
would describe that she was still a slave in Georgia
after World War II, or just before. And it never made
sense to me. And now, it does."
BILL MOYERS: It is amazing that this was happening at a
time when many of the African-Americans retiring today,
were children.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Were children, exactly. Exactly. And
so, again, these are events unlike Antebellum slavery.
These are things that connect directly to the lives and
the shape and pattern and structure of our society
today.
BILL MOYERS: Does it explain to you why there might be
so much anger in the black community among, let's say,
African-Americans who are my age, 73, 74, who were
children at the time this was still going on?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, there's no way that anybody can
read this book and come away still wondering why there
is a sort of fundamental cultural suspicion among
African-Americans of the judicial system, for instance.
I mean, that suspicion is incredibly well-founded. The
judicial system, the law enforcement system of the South
became primarily an instrument of coercing people into
labor and intimidating blacks away from their civil
rights. That was its primary purpose, not the punishment
of lawbreakers. And so, yes, these events build an
unavoidable and irrefutable case for the kind of anger
that still percolates among many, many African-Americans
today.
BILL MOYERS: If people want to know more about not only
your book, but about all of this, for research and so
forth, where do they go?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Go to my website, or the book's
website,
BILL MOYERS: Douglas Blackmon, thanks for being with me.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Thank you for having me.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/145263
A few"new books" have been recently published pertaining to the "historic" American governmental policy and societal executed implementation of shall we say "black containment and maximization."
The gargantuan American political and social policy complicity of managing and controlling the negro-mulatto-black-african-american economic presence is reflected in these new-old-same-old story books.
"Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files"
"Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers"
"Slavery by Another Name"
and even a recent documentary Who Kept Slavery in America a Secret in the 20th Century? The Untold Story: 20th Century Slavery" challenge inquiring minds.
Can we embrace the African Sankofa paradigm of looking backing and forwards at the same time in order to create an intelligent future?
What if any is the impact of historical economic legacies and generational wealth building implosion?
Voices of Emancipation By Donald R. Shaffer and Elizabeth Regosin, seeks to recover the lives and words of former slaves using the case files of the U.S. Pension Bureau, which administered a huge pension system for Union veterans and their
survivors in the decades following the Civil War. The files contain an
invaluable, first-hand perspective of slavery, emancipation, black
military service, and freedom. Moreover, as Pension Bureau examiners
began interviewing black Union veterans and their families shortly after
the Civil War, the files are arguably among the earliest sources of
ex-slaves reflecting on their lives, occurring decades before
better-known WPA Slave Narratives of the 1930s took place.
Voices of Emancipation explores the words of former slaves topically, beginning
with recollections of slavery, moving on to experiences of military
service in the Civil War, the transition to freedom, and finally to
reflections on marriage and family before and after emancipation. It has
an introduction that places the pension files in context and presents
the themes of the book, and historical commentary interwoven throughout
the excerpts of the interviews themselves.
Richard S. Newman, Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen,
the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers
Born a slave in colonial Philadelphia, Allen secured his freedom during
the American Revolution, and went on to become one of the leading black
activists before the Civil War. Allen's list of achievements includes
forming the AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, publishing the
first African American eulogy for George Washington, and convening the
first national convention of black reformers. Allen's work went on to
influence nearly every black leader of the nineteenth century, from
Douglass to Dubois.
Slavery by Another Name:
The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II
Author: Douglas A. Blackmon
The Age of Neo-Slavery
In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history—when a cynical new form of slavery was resurrected from the ashes of the Civil War and re-imposed on hundreds of thousands of African-Americans until 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, brick-yards, 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.
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.
Who Kept Slavery in America a Secret in the 20th Century?
"The Untold Story: 20th Century Slavery"
- When did slavery in America end? The American history books teach us that enslaved Blacks in the United States of America celebrated their freedom in 1863, when Abraham Lincoln freed us by enacting the Emancipation Proclamation.
But what if--just if--America's grips on slavery never loosen? What if slavery continued to be reality for African Americans in sixteen states and sixteen counties throughout Mississippi, from Kosciusko, MS the childhood hometown of Oprah Winfrey to the hometown of Morgan Freeman, Clarksdale, MS down to the lonely roads of Money, MS where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955.
Antoinette Harrell
What if the same hunger for a slave economy still nourished America's soils and perverted Southern appetite as it feast along the mightiest rivers.
Deep in the bowels of America's richest agricultural belt behind a million cotton bolt,lived the 20th century masters and African Americans, who were still under the whips and flogging of the master and overseers. Still working from sun up to sun down, who dares to utter the word "slavery," yet lived its reality each and every backbreaking day.
So why don't you know anything about slavery in the 20th Century. The U.S. Government knew, the FBI knew, the NAACP knew, Governor Earl Brewer of Mississippi knew, President Calvin Coolidge, President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew, local sheriffs, elected officials knew, and the Supreme Court knew.
You didn't know because the truth of this American nightmare--for those who lived it--has been buried in an unnamed darkness in dusty courthouse attics and the National Archives "Department of Justice" files in Washington, D.C.
Documentary film maker, writer and producer Antoinette Harrell have dedicated the last ten years of my life exposing the truth and facts. Harrell has researched through thousands of documents housed in the National Archives and traveled throughout Mississippi, searching through criminal and civil documents as it relates to peonage "Involuntary Servitude" a condition of slavery.
Antoinette Harrell has unearthed peonage research documents. Hear for example former slave Mae Louise Miller recount her personal experience as a slave in the 20th Century during the '40s, '50s, '60s and her escape from slavery in 1963.
Bill Moyers Interview: 'Slavery by Another Name'
June 20, 2008
BILL MOYERS: That was just a portion of the film. When
"Traces of the Trade" airs on P.O.V. next week, Katrina
Browne and several of her kinfolk follow the path of
those ships to the West Coast of Africa, on to Cuba,
where the DeWolfs owned a huge slave plantation, and
then back again to new England, where an orderly economy
run by pious, church-going people prospered from their
bargain with the devil. You'll hear those modern DeWolfs
struggling to come to terms with what they've learned
about their "crazy partnership" with silence between the
present and the past. Denial of course was not unique to
the DeWolf family. Every time I walked downtown where I
grew up in Texas, I passed the statue of Johnny Reb,
facing east toward Richmond, the capitol of the
Confederacy, reminding us of the bravery of gallant men
who fought and died to protect a way of life .
Tragically, it was a way of life built around slavery.
BILL MOYERS: At one time there were thousands of slaves
in our county. And after Richmond fell to Union troops,
my home town became, briefly, the military headquarters
of the Confederacy. But in twelve years of public
schools I cannot remember one of the teachers I deeply
cherished describe slavery for what it was. Nor did
they, or anyone I knew, talk about how our town's dark
and tortured past in restoring white supremacy after the
Civil War, prevented the emancipated slaves from
realizing the freedom they had been promised. Across the
South, from Texas and Louisiana to the Carolinas,
thousands of freed black Americans simply were arrested,
often on trumped up charges, and coerced into forced
labor. And that persisted right up into the 1940s, when
I was still a boy.
BILL MOYERS: Look at these pictures. Those photographs
are from one of the most stunning new books you'll read
this year, Slavery by Another Name. The author is
Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall
Street Journal. His articles on race, wealth and other
issues have been nominated for Pulitzer Prizes four
times. His reporting on U.S.Steel and the company's use
of forced labor was included in the 2003 edition of Best
Business Stories, and his contribution to the Journal's
coverage of Hurricane Katrina received a Special
Headliner Award in 2006. Welcome.
This is truly the most remarkable piece of reporting I
have read in a long time. I honestly cannot recommend it
highly enough. What you report is that no sooner did the
slave owners, businessmen of the South, lose the Civil
War, then they turned around, and in complicity with
state and local governments and industry, reinvented
slavery by another name. And what was the result?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, the result was that by the time
you got to the end of the 19th century, 25 or 30 years
after the Civil War, the generation of slaves who'd been
freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, and then the
constitutional amendments that ended slavery legally
this generation of people, who experienced authentic
freedom in many respects tough life, difficult hard
lives after the Civil War but real freedom, in which
they voted, they participated in government.
BILL MOYERS: They farmed?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They farmed. They carved out
independent lives. But then, this terrible shadow began
to fall back across black life in America, that
effectively re-enslaved enormous numbers of people. And
what that was all about, what that was rooted in, was
that the southern economic, and in a way, the American
economy, was addicted to slavery, was addicted to forced
labor. And the South could not resurrect itself.
And so, there was this incredible economic imperative to
bring back coerced labor. And they did, on a huge scale.
BILL MOYERS: You said they did it by criminalizing black
life.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and that was that was a charade.
But the way that happened was that, of course, before
the Civil War, there were Slave Codes. There were laws
that governed the behavior of slaves. And that was the
basis of laws, for instance, that made it where a slave
had to have a written pass to leave their plantation and
travel on an open road.
Well, immediately after the Civil War, all the southern
states adopted a new set of laws that were then called
Black Codes. And they essentially attempted to recreate
the Slave Codes. Well, those that was such an obvious
effort to recreate slavery, that the Union military
leadership that was still in the South, overruled all of
that. Still, that didn't work. And by the time you get
to the end of Reconstruction, all the southern
legislatures have gone back and passed laws that aren't
called Black Codes, but essentially criminalized a whole
array of activities, that it was impossible for a poor
black farmer to avoid encountering in some way.
BILL MOYERS: Such as?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Vagrancy. So, vagrancy was a law that
essentially, it simply, you were breaking the law if you
couldn't prove at any given moment that you were
employed. Well, in a world in which there were no pay
stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The
only way you could prove employment was if some man who
owned land would vouch for you and say, he works for me.
And of course, none of these laws said it only applies
to black people. But overwhelmingly, they were only
enforced against black people. And many times, thousands
of times I believe, you had young black men who
attempted to do that. They ended up being arrested and
returned to the original farmer where they worked in
chains, not even a free worker, but as a slave.
BILL MOYERS: And the result, as you write, thousands of
black men were arrested, charged with whatever, jailed,
and then sold to plantations, railroads, mills, lumber
camps and factories in the deep South. And this went on,
you say, right up to World War II?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And it was everywhere in the South.
These forced labor camps were all over the place. The
records that still survive, buried in courthouses all
over the South, make it abundantly clear that thousands
and thousands of African-Americans were arrested on
completely specious claims, made up stuff, and then,
purely because of this economic need and the ability of
sheriffs and constables and others to make money off
arresting them, and that providing them to these
commercial enterprises, and being paid for that.
BILL MOYERS: You have a photograph in here I have
literally not been able to get this photograph out of my
mind since I saw it the first time several weeks ago,
when I first got your book. It's a photograph of an
unnamed prisoner tied around a pickaxe for punishment in
a Georgia labor camp. It was photographed some time
around 1932, which this is hard to believe was two years
before I was born.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, that picture was taken by a
journalist named John Spivak, who took an astonishing
series of pictures in these forced labor camps in
Georgia in the 1930s. He got access to the prison system
of Georgia and these forced labor encampments, which
were scattered all over the place. Some of them were way
out in the deep woods. There were turpentine camps. Some
of them were mining camps. All incredibly harsh, brutal
work. He got access to these as a journalist, in part,
because the officials of Georgia had no particular shame
in what was happening.
BILL MOYERS: That's a surprising thing.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, and but what the picture also
demonstrates was the level of violence and brutality,
the venality of things that were done. And so, this kind
of physical torture went on, on a huge scale. People
were whipped, starved. They went without clothing. There
were work camps where people reported that they would
arrive looking for a lost family member, and they would
arrive at a sawmill or a lumber camp where the men were
working as slaves naked, chained, you know, whipped. It
was it's just astonishing, the level of brutality.
BILL MOYERS: You have a story in here of a young man who
a teenager who spilled or poured coffee on the hog of
the farmer he was working for. He was stripped,
stretched across a barrel, and flogged 69 times with a
leather strap. And he died a week later. But that's not
a unique story in this book.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: No, that was incredibly common. And
there were on the there were thousands and thousands of
people who died under these circumstances over the span
of the period that I write about in the book. And over
and over again, it was from disease and malnutrition,
and from outright homicide and physical abuse.
BILL MOYERS: You give voice to a young man long dead,
whose voice would never had been heard, had you not
discovered it, resurrected it, and presented it. He's
the chief character in this book. Green Cottenham, is
that is.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Yes, that's right.
BILL MOYERS: Tell me about Green Cottenham.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Green Cottenham was a man in the 1880s
born to a mother and a father who, both of whom had been
slaves, who were emancipated at the end of the Civil
War. Imagine, a young man and a young woman who've just
been freed from slavery. And now they have the
opportunity to break away from the plantations where
they'd been held, begin a new life. And so, they do.
They marry. They have many children. Green Cottenham is
the last of them.
He's born in the 1880s, just as this terrible curtain of
hostility and oppression is beginning to really creep
across all of black life in the South. And by the time
he becomes an adult, in the first years of the 20th
century, the worst forces of the efforts to re-enslave
black Americans are in full power across the South. And
in the North, the allies, the white allies of the freed
slaves, have abandoned them. And so, right at the before
of the 20th century, whites all across America have
essentially reached this new consensus that slavery
shouldn't be brought back. But if African-Americans are
returned to a state of absolute servility, that's okay.
And Green Cottenham becomes an adult at exactly that
moment. And then, in 1908, in the spring of 1908, he's
arrested, standing outside a train station in a little
town in Alabama. The officer who arrested him couldn't
remember what the charge was by the time he brought him
in front of the judge. So he's conveniently convicted of
a different crime than the one he was originally picked
up for. He ends up being sold three days later, with
another group of black men, into a coal mine outside of
Birmingham. And he survives there several months, and
then dies under terrible circumstances.
BILL MOYERS: You write, 45 years after Lincoln's
Emancipation Proclamation, Cottenham was one of
thousands of men working like a slave in these
coalmines. Slope 12, you call it.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Slope number 12.
BILL MOYERS: What was slope number 12?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Slope number 12 was a huge mine on the
outskirts of Birmingham, part of a maze of mines.
Birmingham is the fastest growing city in the country.
Huge amounts of wealth and investment are pouring into
the place.
But there's this again, this need for forced labor. And
the very men, the very entrepreneurs who, just before
the Civil War, were experimenting with a kind of
industrial slavery, using slaves in factories and
foundries, and had begun to realize, hey, this works
just as well as slaves out on the farm.
The very same men who were doing that in the 1850s, come
back in the 1870s and begin to reinstitute the same form
of slavery. And Green Cottenham is one of the men, one
of the many thousands of men who were sucked into the
process, and then lived under these terribly brutalizing
circumstances, this place that was filled with disease
and malnutrition. And he dies there under terrible,
terrible circumstances.
BILL MOYERS: And you found the sunken graves five miles
from downtown Birmingham?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It's just miles away. In fact there
are just two places there, because all of these mines
now are abandoned. Everything is overgrown. There are
almost no signs of human activity, except that if you
dig deep into the woods, grown over there, you begin to
see, if you get the light just right, hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of depressions where these bodies
were buried.
BILL MOYERS: You say that Atlanta, where you live now,
which used to proclaim itself the finest city in the
South, was built on the broken backs of re-enslaved
black men.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: That's right. When I started off
writing the book, I began to realize the degree to which
this form of enslavement had metastasized across the
South, and that Atlanta was one of many places where the
economy that created the modern city, was one that
relied very significantly on this form of coerced labor.
And some of the most prominent families and individuals
in the in the creation of the modern Atlanta, their
fortunes originated from the use of this practice. And
the most dramatic example of that was a brick factory on
the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century,
was producing hundreds of thousands of bricks every
day.The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of
those bricks. The factory was operated entirely with
forced workers. And almost 100 percent black forced
workers. There were even times that on Sunday
afternoons, a kind of old-fashioned slave auction would
happen, where a white man who controlled black workers
would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse trade with
the guards at Chattahoochee Brick, trading one man for
another, or two men. And-
BILL MOYERS: And yet, slavery was illegal?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: It had been illegal for 40 years. And
this is a really important thing to me. I was stunned
when I realized that because the city of Atlanta bought
these millions and millions of bricks, well, those are
the bricks that paved the downtown streets of Atlanta.
And those bricks are still there. And so these are the
bricks that we stand on.
BILL MOYERS: Didn't this economic machine that was built
upon forced labor, didn't these Black Codes, the way
that black life was criminalized, didn't this put
African-Americans at a terrific economic disadvantage
then and now?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Absolutely. The results of those laws
and the results of particularly enforcing them with such
brutality through this forced labor system, the result
of that was that African-Americans thousands and
thousands of them worked for years and years of their
lives with no compensation whatsoever, no ability to end
up buying property and enjoying the mechanisms of
accumulating wealth in the way that white Americans did.
This was a part of denying black Americans access to
education, denying black Americans access to basic
infrastructure, like paved roads, the sorts of things
that made it possible for white farmers to become
successful.
And so, yes, this whole regime of the Black Codes, the
way that they were enforced, the physical intimidation
and racial violence that went on, all of these were
facets of the same coin that made it incredibly less
likely that African-Americans would emerge out of
poverty in the way that millions of white Americans did
at the same time.
BILL MOYERS: How is it, you and I both Southerners, how
is it we could grow up right after this era, and be so
unaware of what had just happened to our part of the
country?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there are a lot of
explanations for that. The biggest one is simply that
this is a history that we haven't wanted to know as a
country. We've engaged in a in a kind of collective
amnesia about this, particularly about the severity of
it.
And the official history of this time, the conventional
history tended to minimize the severity of the things
that were done again and again and again, and to focus
instead, on the idea, on a lot of false mythologies.
Like, this idea that freed slaves after emancipation
became lawless and sort of went wild, and thievery, and
all sorts of crimes being committed by African-Americans
right after the Civil War and during Reconstruction. But
when you go back, as I did, and look at the arrest
records from that period of time, there's just no
foundation for that. And the reality was there was
hardly any crime at all. And huge numbers of people were
being arrested on these specious charges, so they could
be forced back into labor.
BILL MOYERS: Another reason -- I just think, as you talk
-- another reason is that anybody who raised these
allegations or charges, or wrote about them when I was
growing up, were dismissed as Communists. If it had been
from The Wall Street Journal, it might have been a
different take.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, I think there's some truth to
that. Anyone who tried to raise these sorts of questions
was at risk of complete excoriation among other white
Southerners. But that's also what's remarkable about the
present moment. And one of the things I've discovered in
the course of talking about the book with people is that
there's an openness to a conversation about these things
that I think didn't exist even ten or 15 years ago.
BILL MOYERS: What has been the response to it? Americans
don't like to confront these pictures, these stories.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: They don't. But over and over and over
again I've encountered people who've read the book, who
e-mailed me, or they come up to me after I talk about it
somewhere, particularly African-Americans, who African-
Americans know this story in their hearts. They may not
know the facts. They may not know exactly what the scale
of things were. But they know in their hearts that this
is what happened. And so, people come up to me and say,
"Gosh, the story that my grandmother used to tell before
she died 20 years ago, I never believed it. Because she
would describe that she was still a slave in Georgia
after World War II, or just before. And it never made
sense to me. And now, it does."
BILL MOYERS: It is amazing that this was happening at a
time when many of the African-Americans retiring today,
were children.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Were children, exactly. Exactly. And
so, again, these are events unlike Antebellum slavery.
These are things that connect directly to the lives and
the shape and pattern and structure of our society
today.
BILL MOYERS: Does it explain to you why there might be
so much anger in the black community among, let's say,
African-Americans who are my age, 73, 74, who were
children at the time this was still going on?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, there's no way that anybody can
read this book and come away still wondering why there
is a sort of fundamental cultural suspicion among
African-Americans of the judicial system, for instance.
I mean, that suspicion is incredibly well-founded. The
judicial system, the law enforcement system of the South
became primarily an instrument of coercing people into
labor and intimidating blacks away from their civil
rights. That was its primary purpose, not the punishment
of lawbreakers. And so, yes, these events build an
unavoidable and irrefutable case for the kind of anger
that still percolates among many, many African-Americans
today.
BILL MOYERS: If people want to know more about not only
your book, but about all of this, for research and so
forth, where do they go?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Go to my website, or the book's
website,
BILL MOYERS: Douglas Blackmon, thanks for being with me.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Thank you for having me.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/145263
Comments
Asante sana, Christina Lashley