Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
by Douglas A. Blackmon
New York, Anchor Books, 2009

Slavery didn't end with the surrender of Confederate forces in 1865. In his recent Pullitzer Prize-winning book, Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas A. Blackmon writes, "the great record of forced labor across the South [after the Civil War] demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945." In his readable, well-researched, and ground-breaking book, Blackmon shows how practices that let local police to arrest, imprison and sell African Americans into forced labor allowed manufacturing, mining, railroad, agribusiness, and financial corporations to reap tremendous profits between the close of the Civil War and World War II.

This regime of forced labor arose in the context following the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Radical Republicans, as they were known, held leadership in Congress immediately following the war and passed a civil rights agenda that included the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, forbidding slavery, providing citizenship and equal protection, and voting rights for African American men. They passed the Civil Rights Act of 1870 that allocated federal resources to the enforcement of these laws. They moved millions of dollars into building public schools and universities for "freedmen." In some places African Americans gained land ownership. African Americans were elected to local, state, and federal offices in the hundreds. For a brief historical moment it appeared as though the seeds of equality could be planted for African Americans who comprised approximately 40 percent of the former Confederacy, but who had been excluded from political representation or economic power.

Reaction to these positive developments set in swiftly, however. Terrorist violence organized and directed by white elites ended most vestiges of Black political power. White landowners regained the upper hand and forced African Americans into a system of debt peonage, whereby most Black tenant farmers worked for years without seeing much income, any savings or prospects for social mobility. By 1910, Blackmon records, "fewer than one-third of nearly 900,000 farms operated by African Americans were owned by the black men who tilled the land." A system of police control was developed, one that resembled that under the slave system, in order to ensure that cheap Black labor stayed put. Indebted African American farmers could leave only at the risk of long-term imprisonment. Laws resembling the "slave codes" of the past were put in place to regulate the activities and movement of African Americans.

As Blackmon reveals, vagrancy laws passed under the restored white supremacist governments were typically used to force Black men and women into penal institutions where they would be sold to work in coal mines, on big plantations, or for railroads for no wages. Sheriffs and local courts developed lucrative deals with companies like the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, which sought to exploit Alabama's booming coal fields. Individuals like former Confederate landowner James M. Smith backed KKK violence that toppled Georgia's Reconstruction government and swiftly moved to force thousnads of African American debt farmers into captivity while expanding his profit-making ventures to include the buying and selling of convict laborers.

Railroads in Georgia, levees in Louisiana, coal mines in Alabama were built or worked by thousands of African American men who were imprisoned for invented crimes and unpaid for grueling work. Former Confederate and Georgia native Joseph E. Brown built much of his fortune on the the use of unpaid convict laborers to exploit his coal mines. John T. Grant and his son William Grant used hundreds of unpaid African American workers to build the Grant, Alexander and Company railroad. Reports of abuse and high mortality did not stop them from coming to control much of Georgia's convict labor system, earning them enormous profits.

Blackmon documents how capitalists such as Joel Hurt, owner of Georgia Iron and Coal Company, James W. English, owner of Atlanta's Chattahoochie Brick Co., John T. Milner, owner of Milner Coal and Railway Co. in Alabama, Alabama plantation owner and convict labor trader John W. Pace, Alabama-based U.S. Steel executive George G. Crawford, and William D. McCurdy, co-owner of Pratt Mines, were among those who established, exploited and profited immensely from the re-enslavement of African Americans after the Civil War.

Northern investors, Southern plantation owners, and corporations like Pratt Mines or Sloss-Sheffield worked in conjunction with local law enforcement and the courts to get thousands of unpaid Black prisoners into their operations. Blackmon points out that after the Civil War, the South underwent an economic transformation in which industry could have provided an economic basis for social progress. Industrial jobs in railroads, iron and steel manufacture, mining, and more could have provided well-paying jobs for southern Blacks and whites. Industrialization with a well-paid workforce could have transformed the South from a racially divided, economically backward region to an advanced one.

Northern investors and capitalists, southern corporations and white elites and policymakers chose a different path, however. They opted for the path of creating the highest profits for themselves through super-exploitation and re-enslavement of Black labor. As one official of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Co. wrote to U.S. Steel owner Henry Clay Frick, a major investor in these Southern operations, "The operations of the convict mines has been very remunerative." U.S. Steel would come to own a number of prison camps that saw tens of thousands of unpaid prison slaves work to extract coal to manufacture the steel that made that mammoth corporation one of the largest corporations in the world.

The conditions of the labor camps were atrocious. Workers were typically forced to work from sun-up to sun-down. They were fed poorly, received little or no healthcare, and were typically physically beaten for failing to show up for work due to illnesses or injuries. An untold number of enslaved workers died in the camps, buried in unmarked graves. Many were killed under these conditions after having been imprisoned for crimes as meager and doubtful as vagrancy or owing money. Blackmon documents incidents where judges knowingly imprisoned innocent men simply to earn their share of a financial kickback from the corporations to whom these men were sold.

Hundreds of requests from African Americans poured into the Department of Justice for relief and investigations about their loved ones trapped in this prison slavery. Many of these letters are still held in government archives. Very few saw serious action on the part of the government. In cases in which investigators were actually sent to follow up, Blackmon uncovered chilling tales. One John S. Williams, a plantation owner from Jasper County, Georgia purchased prisoners to work his land. After torturing and murdering one prisoner for failing to work as hard as Williams expected, another prisoner by the name of Gus Chapman escaped and told the story to federal officials. When they came to investigate, they decided that Williams had violated federal peonage laws, but noted that he probably wouldn't face prosecution. Panicked by the visit, Williams helped his overseer kill every prison laborer and dump their bodies in a nearby river. When the bodies surfaced, federal agents returned. Williams was convicted of murder as the bad publicity threatened to expose the nature of the prison labor system and ruin it for everyone. It turns out, Williams was the only white person ever found guilty of this crime.

If protests by African Americans fell on deaf ears, concerns among whites about the growing publicity about the violence and brutality of the system could not. By the 1920s, civil rights groups and labor unions increasingly demanded the prison labor system be ended. Newspapers began to expose the story as a matter of public corruption, revealing that local law enforcement officials raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in kick backs for turning prisoners over to the slave labor camps. Soon state politicians bent to the bad publicity and implemented reforms, first for better treatment of the prisoners, then for abolition of the prison labor system altogether. Not until 1948, however, with executive orders from President Harry Truman did federal officials act to finally close down the last prison labor camps.

Blackmon's book provides an important historical basis for an open and honest dialogue about reparations for slavery. Many whites who want to avoid such a discussion dismiss it with a comment like, "I shouldn't have to pay because what do I have to do with happened in the past" – as if the slavery system, capitalism and white supremacy, stopped benefiting them and their families once its most inhumane forms were ended. Moreover, the evidence in the book links corporate agendas to the practice of using the enslaved labor of African Americans. Families, individuals, and companies are identified as perpetrators. If this book makes part of the case for reparations, and it does, a great deal of the financial burden must be carried by corporations who profited from forced labor and the local, state, and federal officials and entities who also earned huge incomes by active participation or turning a bind eye.