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    Slavery by Another Name: The re-enslavement of black americans from the civil war to World War Two
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    Slavery by Another Name: The re-enslavement of black americans from the civil war to World War Two
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    Slavery by Another Name: The re-enslavement of black americans from the civil war to World War Two
    Ebook725 pages12 hours

    Slavery by Another Name: The re-enslavement of black americans from the civil war to World War Two

    By Douglas A. Blackmon

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon 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 thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIcon Books Ltd
    Release dateOct 4, 2012
    ISBN9781848314139
    Unavailable
    Slavery by Another Name: The re-enslavement of black americans from the civil war to World War Two

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    Reviews for Slavery by Another Name

    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      This is top-notch reporting of an unusually large portion of American history that stretches from the end of the American Civil War and early Reconstruction to the two World Wars. For reasons that are not readily apparent to the less informed, Americans have a strong tendency to simplify black history and have a hard time understanding what did NOT happen is often times more important than what did. For instance, the Emancipation Proclamation is frequently touted as freeing all the slaves, which of course it did not do. It freed the slaves held by just the rebel states, which, of course, meant they were not actually free to leave their captures at the time. Similarly, many Americans presume that Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement made blacks equal in America. Instead, Fox News reports how we don't have poor blacks because they have refrigerators, which means America has no poverty, so quit your bitching and accept any low paying job white folks haven't given away to foreign countries yet or been underbid by Latino immigrants. The fact is, as one form of slavery ended in 1865, another, more brutal form developed. This over simplifies the situation, but basically the South stopped owning and more "properly" maintaining its "human" equipment and switched to a cheaper, easily replaceable -- and thus easily destroyed and discarded -- temporary equipment, i.e., fraudulently created convict labor. The David Oshinsky book, Worse Than Slavery, touches on the same subject, but this author takes a different, more thorough, more impassioned approach. It could be pointed out that just as Oshinsky and this author cover this important gap in America's understanding of the black experience, books like Michelle Alexander book, The New Jim Crow, covers the new "misunderstanding" of the black experience since Martin Luther King, Jr. and the other Civil Rights Movement leaders populated the news media. Black history isn't just Denzel Washington in "Glory" and Gene Hackman and friends in "Mississippi Burning". It's a long continuous, ever-changing history of whites effortlessly playing whack-a-mole with black equality.
    • 5/5
      Anyone who wonders why blacks have had such a difficult time after the Civil War needs to read this book. Slavery, although officially over, was not really gone. It was replaced by a different kind of slavery in many ways worse than the pre-Civil War days. It was a slavery that existed in parts of the South until 1945. This book is extremely well documented and very eye-opening.
    • 5/5
      I feel compelled to admit that I struggled with rating this book. On one level, it is wonderfully well-written; on another, it tells some of the most horrific stories I've EVER read...stories that would rival and surpass many horror novels. And they are all true. Essentially, Blackmon tells in astonishing detail the use of the convict labor system in the deep South to essentially re-instate a kind of neo-slavery that drove the post-Civil War industrial boom. He does a great job of demonstrating the breadth of the problem while offering up a "thick description" of the particular history of convict Green Cottenham, who died as an prison laborer in an Alabama coal mine. Beginning with Cottenham, Blackmon then unfolds an entire network of corrupt judges, cruel sherriffs, and greedy businessmen that worked vigorously from just after the end of the Civil War until the beginning of World War II to negate all the hope and promise of the Emancipation Proclamation for the liberation of American slaves. He does a SUPERB job of explicating all the economic, social, and legal aspects of this outrage.Perhaps one of the most important parts of the book is its conclusion where Blackmon traces the lineages of the companies that profited from the use of neo-slave labor in the first half of the 20th century. He then asks some hard questions about their moral responsibility for the actions of their corporate forbears, noting that companies are held responsible for parent and predecessor companies' ecological crimes...but not for the ways that it has profited from the use of convict labor. Blackmon explicitly says the book is not just a call for financial reparations; however, at the end of the day, he DOES raise that issue, while acknowledging the ambiguities and difficulties that would confront any such project.The convict labor system is perhaps THE classic example from American history of what theologians call "systemic sin," every bit as dastardly and morally reprehensible as South African aparatheid (perhaps more so given our ever-arrogant claims of the moral high ground). At the end of the day, it is still the product of individual human choices, but we often forget that a system grounded in such sinful choices and dispositions cannot help but be itself "sinful"! And if salvation is, at its most basic, deliverance from sin, that must at some level include the dismantling of sin-laden social systems. Some evangelicals have criticized the renewed call for attention to social justice issues as somehow an "abandonment" of any meaningful doctrine of sin (e.g., blaming "the system" rather than holding people morally responsible); however, I think a book such as this goes a VERY long way to showing that most of those criticisms are short-sighted and ultimately untrue. Recognizing the "sinfulness of systems" is simply a recognition of how sin is "exceedingly sinful" (Rom. 7:13). At the end of the day, this book deserves every one of five stars for how unflinchingly it reveals this dark chapter of American history and then proceeds to ask the very tough (but exactly appropriate) questions. It is a great book precisely because it is such a challenging book. If you want to understand the REAL nature of race relations in America today, this book is absolutely indispensable, in my opinion.
    • 4/5
      Well-written, well-researched, and absolutely history of many Black Americans in the South between the Civil War and World War II.
    • 3/5
      Blackmon starts the book by saying it is the story of Green Cottingham, but it is a lot more than that and overly dense with information.
    • 5/5
      An excellent book - a repulsive, ugly, and disturbing look at the conscious efforts in the deep south to "re-establish" slavery of African Americans after the end of Reconstruction.This legacy of cruelty, bigotry, and lack of morals will never again permit me to look at the deep south in the same way. The facts laid out in this book completely shatter the commonly held mythology and romanticism of the south. What a disgusting place they hold in USA history.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful and true book. The Wall Street Journal used to be a pretty good paper, with lots of stories about all kinds of things, but now owned by Murdoch it is another right wing rag. The author goes into all kinds of research about the slavery imposed by jerks like southern sheriffs and justices of the peace and corporations. Blackmon is a great writer and this is a needed book. It is a little repetitious in parts where the slavery is so outrageous, like Alabama. I am amazed that Ken Thompson, whom I knew when he was head of First Union, decided to come clean on the prior corporation's ownership of slaves; unfortunately, the surviving company, Wachovia, did not make it out of the recession.
    • 5/5
      What Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee did for the so-called “Indian Wars,” Douglas A Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name does for the period between Emancipation and World War II. We all know about the Emancipation Proclamation and the South’s reaction: the Ku Klux Klan, sharecropping, the Poll Tax, segregation and lynchings. We knew that freed blacks were discriminated against in every facet of their lives. What I didn’t know, even as a history major, was the extent to which the South’s judicial system and industrialization recreated an even more despicable system of slavery than existed prior to Emancipation.

      While antebellum slave holders had a financial interest in the health of their “property,” the corporations and private farmers after the Civil War had no such interest because the slaves were leased. If you killed your slaves intentionally or otherwise, you simply put in an order for another and a sheriff would arrest another black man (sometimes even specific men based on request) for vagrancy, gambling, swearing, hopping a freight train or talking too loudly in the presence of a white woman. Justices of the Peace found the black men guilty, assessed a penalty and court costs. Even on the rare occasion in which an African American could pay the penalty for the crime, court costs were inevitably too high for all but the “wealthiest." Corporations and private farmers then offered to pay the fee and court costs and allow the convicted black man to work off his “debt.” Inevitably, additional costs were accrued during his imprisonment or he was charged with another crime immediately upon completion of his sentence so the debt was never paid and he was for all intents and purposes a slave for perpetuity or until he died or was no longer physically able to work. Waterboarding, daily whippings, dogs, shotguns, disease and 24-hour shackling awaited men who were guilty of no more than being African Americans in public. This system didn’t die completely until halfway through the 20th century.

      Slavery By Another Name is shocking throughout. In 1921, a prominent farmer named John S. Williams was visited by a federal agent regarding the African America men laboring on his property. Shortly thereafter, Williams personally killed and ordered the death of all eleven so they couldn’t testify against him. He was convicted of murder and remained the only white man convicted of killing a black man in Georgia from 1877 to 1966 (page 364). I was born in 1966.

      When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt knew they would exploit the continuing enslavement of African Americans for propaganda purposes. He gave the order that the federal government would once again act to eliminate involuntary servitude. Even so, it wasn’t until 1951 that Congress finally closed the remaining loopholes Americans relied upon to enslave their fellow countrymen.

      Douglas A Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name is tough to read. It’s hard to face the facts of our past. It is only by doing so, however, that we can both fully appreciate the freedoms we all enjoy today and guard against those Americans who refuse even today to respect their fellow human beings.
    • 5/5
      Everyone knows at least vaguely of the so-called Jim Crow era starting around 1880 and continuing until the civil rights movement gained impetus in the 1960’s. Adults of a certain age remember the tumult of social and legal forces that finally brought to an end the discrimination that relegated African-Americans to second-class status in our country. What people may not know, though, is that in the years immediately following the Civil War the newly-freed slaves were accorded the full panoply of civil rights, including voting, free education, holding civil office, and participating in the justice system. These rights were secured by the continued occupation of the former Confederate states by federal military forces.After the withdrawal of the federal government in 1876 things began to change dramatically. Within a few years blacks were utterly stripped of all rights guaranteed in our democracy. White supremacists, taking advantage of the waning interest of northerners in the status of blacks, began a systematic and pervasive campaign to re-subjugate blacks in every dimension of social, civic, legal and economic life. Among the many notorious manifestations of this effort was the share cropping system that put black tenant farmers at the complete mercy of white landowners through a process of compensation so rigged that escape from virtual bondage was nearly impossible. The infamous Supreme Court decision of Plessey v Ferguson in the late 1890’s consigned blacks to segregation in public accommodations and education under the specious notion that the due process guarantees of the Constitution allowed “separate but equal” treatment of the races.The stain that Jim Crow has left on our nation’s moral standing is deepened through Blackmon’s exhaustively-researched history of a horrific aspect of abuse of black citizens. Thousands of blacks were re-enslaved through a pseudo-legal mechanism that placed them in bondage, often for years, to labor for corporations or farms in the southern states. The despicable process worked this way: Blacks would be arrested usually for minor misdemeanor (or phony) charges such as vagrancy, gambling, hopping freight trains, etc. In sham proceedings in local courts, they would be convicted and given a fine plus court costs. Most could not pay the costs. A business interest or plantation would step in and agree to pay the state or locality the fines and fees in exchange for compulsory labor of a certain duration. The jurisdictions would gain revenue from these “leases”; very often the arresting sheriff and/or sentencing judge would reap the monetary rewards. In many instances, farmers or businesses seeking cheap labor would solicit local authorities to round up persons in this way to fill their labor needs. The confinement and treatment of these victims was deplorable: gross physical abuse, filthy living arrangements, the most arduous and unsafe working conditions, non-existent health care, and, in more than a few cases, murder by guards or overseers. Blackmon points out that, as despicable as slavery was, slave owners had at least the economic incentive to provide a modicum of care for their “property” that the new enslavers did not. Working people to death in this peonage system meant only that their replacements could be sought.Around the turn of the century the federal Department of Justice made some efforts to combat this new form of slavery. The government’s success was limited by the difficulty of gaining convictions from all-white juries and by the intimidation of victims and witnesses. The determination to combat this crime against citizens changed to indifference as prosecutorial success waned. The exploitation of peon labor continued until World War II when the US government began to fear the propaganda opportunities that these practices presented to our enemies and began to crack down in earnest. Blackmon also recounts other means of violence perpetuated against blacks: lynching’s, assaults and murder against which black citizens had no protection or legal recourse. The sexual abuse of black women by white men did not end with slavery; it was shockingly prevalent throughout Jim Crow times. Blackmon’s descriptions of and explanations into southern white supremacy of this long era can only create revulsion of those who held these notions. One stills hears occasionally the expression “pride in our Southern heritage” and this grates. We still see the Confederate flag flaunted as if it’s something other than a reminder of shame. But no one can be off the hook here as it is equally clear that the indifference of the entire nation to what was happening in the southern states played no small role in enabling the perpetuation of such monumental injustices. As the cynic once said, “History is the means through which we betray the past”. I think that every good history should make us think about history and Blackmon’s book certainly does this. Starting in the 1880’s, public and even scholarly thinking about the war, slavery and race took a conceptual path that led to ill-conceived justification of the malevolent racism that pervaded the times. Blackmon describes the post-war emergence of the “Lost Cause” mythology which exalted the “valiant glory of the southern warriors” over the harsh truth of the treason of secession and the human bondage that led to it. There was nostalgia about the “good” life slaves formerly had under the care of beneficent masters. He looks at the effects of the era’s infatuation with Social Darwinism that “scientifically” explained the superiority of the white race. Blackmon makes crystal clear that economic imperatives motivated whites to manipulate blacks into coercive labor arrangements; for instance, states made it a crime for blacks to leave employment without the permission of their employer.This notion that history is prone to distortions, that there is danger in not recognizing the self-serving recasting of historical truth, has personal resonance for me. I grew up as a child and teenager in the deep south in the late 50’s and early 60’s. I well remember that my teachers of American history taught about the riotous circumstances and depravity during Reconstruction resulting from black hegemony propped up by the villainous federal government, only vitiated by putting blacks back in their proper place. I remember my teachers and peers vitriolic disdain for the aims of civil rights activists and their unabashed use of the “N” word. Even though school segregation was ruled unconstitutional in 1954 I did not have one black student in any school I attended from 1955-1965. Resentment toward the north for its perceived interference with the “southern way of life” (code phrase for segregation) was still acute in the early 1960’s. I remember so clearly the “whites only” designations at all manner of public facilities. Growing up in a household of northern parents who were not racist I’d like to think that I resisted the pervasive racism that was all around me, that I saw it to be degrading and immoral, that I found it as repugnant then as I do now. But, did I? Oh, tread carefully on the thin ice of memory! Why does this matter? It matters because our personal or collective failure to accurately understand the past diminishes and makes superficial our understanding of the present. And the consequent absence of criticality diminishes our obligation to be moral and just. Whether it’s personal memories or the large scale history of our past the imperative of getting it right is hugely important. In this light, Blackmon has done our nation’s memory a great service.
    • 4/5
      What is slavery? Is it the absence of any right to self-determination? Is it being bought and sold in the same way as livestock? Does bonded labour fall into its definition? Is it being free to work for a pittance and obey the Man's rules and regulations, which might be made up on the spot if your face doesn't fit and then suffer the consequences from a beating, to imprisonment, even death?

      I don't know how America defined slavery but it was obviously in a fake and euphemistic way if the Government can say it ended in (variously, according to state) between 1863 and 1865 actually teach that lie in schools. Because, in the South, right up until WWII it remained legal to buy and sell people.

      I don't want this to turn into an essay. It is a very, very good book, written in a very readable manner and I recommend it to everyone, everywhere, but especially those in the US and those that have some influence on what their education board decides their children should be taught. Children have a right to know the truth if they are going to repair old enmities and move forward into a world which drops the divisions and sings that lovely old kiddies' song,

      'the more we are together the happier we will be'.
    • 5/5
      An ugly, miserable, little-known chapter of American history everyone should know about.
    • 5/5
      An excellent book - a repulsive, ugly, and disturbing look at the conscious efforts in the deep south to "re-establish" slavery of African Americans after the end of Reconstruction.This legacy of cruelty, bigotry, and lack of morals will never again permit me to look at the deep south in the same way. The facts laid out in this book completely shatter the commonly held mythology and romanticism of the south. What a disgusting place they hold in USA history.
    • 4/5
      Martin Luther King, Jr. once commented of civil rights history that "The South deluded itself with the illusion that the Negro was happy in his place; the North deluded itself with the illusion that it had freed the Negro."This Pulitzer Prize-winning exploration of the widespread Southern judiciary and law enforcement's lucrative exploitation of black "criminal" forced labor is nothing short of chilling. And compelling. The narrative is based on the search for the family and grave of Green Cottenham, a black man sentenced to almost a year of hard labor for "vagrancy" in Alabama in 1908. The judiciary and sheriff "leased" his labor to a subsidiary of U.S. Steel for $12, but the hard labor didn't end until Cottenham's undocumented death. Horrific conditions identical to - or worse than - antebellum slavery were the lot of blacks arrested and convicted of (usually) trumped-up charges in a system without any defenses. Southern blacks, powerless as they were, were further persuaded that “good Negros” needn’t fear being kidnapped back into slavery. This system, which began shortly after the Civil War, persisted all the way to World War II. It is difficult to know, as a white woman in a racially mixed family, that our families, our commercial connections and institutions were complicit in this practice, if only by not questioning it. The author notes that “[I] uncovered an unsettling truth that when white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. [. . .] It is not our “fault”. But it is undeniably our inheritance.” (p394-5) I could not agree more. This book, along with The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Vintage) by Isabel Wilkerson (Oct 4, 2011)” should be required reading for all Americans.
    • 5/5
      This is a profound and very well researched book. It documents a chapter in American history that is very little known and that many people do not care to face. After you have read this book, full of documented court proceedings and historical records; you will come to the full realization that what they didn't teach you in school, is that slavery did not end with the civil war. Slavery started to come to a halt with the advent of World War II. The atrocities committed in America by American citizens and to American citizens with the cooperation of government at nearly every level up to and including the U.S. President are mind boggling. It's easy for us to berate other countries and how they might abuse the rights of their citizens. But first, you should know what was done under the auspices of the United States of America for at least 90 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. This book should be compulsory reading for every American high school student. Yes, the past must be put behind us; but in order to do that, we must first understand what took place in the past; so that we may be assured we will never be guilty of such crimes again.
    • 4/5
      This Pulitzer Prize winning book analyzes why blacks did not rise in American society after emancipation until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It provides an answer to those who counter the lack of black achievement with the “bootstrapping” advancement of immigrant populations. And most importantly it shows that long past the time of the Civil War, slavery was actually still alive and well in the South in all but name, with active support of the state and federal governments.Here’s how it worked (and a vast record of documents unearthed by the author attests to this system):"By 1900," Blackmon writes, "the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites." Thousands of random indigent black men were arrested for anything from unemployment, to not being able to prove employment at any given moment, to changing employers without “permission”, or even loud talk. In other words, they were arrested for being young black men. They were sentenced to hard labor, and bought and sold by sheriffs and judges among other opportunists to corporations such as U.S. Steel, Tennessee Coal, railroads, lumber camps, and factories. The prisoners who were sent to mines were chained to their barracks at night, and required to work all day – “subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners – many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement.” Hundreds died of disease, accidents, or homicide, and in fact, mass burial fields near these old mines can still be located.Blackmon charges that the desire to industrialize the South quickly was central to the restrictions put in place to suppress blacks, since these laws allowed for easy arrest and enslavement of workers. He avers, "Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime.” But also, and quite importantly, “these bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations.” Millions of blacks lived in a shadow of fear that they or their family members would be taken into this system. It had a profound effect on their behavior and self-esteem.Meanwhile, the whites in the North were impatient about blacks, and saw their lack of achievement as indicative of inferiority. An 1874 article in the Chicago Tribune asked:"Is it not time for the colored race to stop playing baby? The whites of America have done nobly in outgrowing the old prejudices against them. They cannot hurry this process by law. Let them obtain social equality as every other man, woman, and child in this world obtain it -- by showing themselves in their lives the social equals of those with whom they wish to consort. If they do this, year-by-year the prejudices will die away."As Blackmon writes, "There was no acknowledgment of the effects of cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation rise above the cusp of poverty only to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new generation of an ever-changing population out-numbered in persons and resources.”He insists that any consideration of the progress of blacks in the United States after the Civil War must acknowledge that "slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945." Thus the parents of today are the children of those who suffered under this egregious system, and so it can be expected that the repercussions continue to inform the expectations and attitudes of those who grew up with the stories and experiences derived from this very recent chapter in their family histories.Evaluation: The story told by Blackmon is horrific. In spite of an abundance of evidence about what happened, history about the neo-slavery that survived after the Civil War is virtually non-existent. Moreover, it is clear from the records that these offenses against blacks were permitted by the nation. The legacy of terror and defeatism has had repercussions up to our present day.Should it be read? Absolutely! But it’s a painful read, and the text includes some ghastly pictures. And yet, as Blackmon concludes:"Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery’s grip on U.S. society – its intimate connections to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to millions of black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end – can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.”
    • 5/5
      No wonder this book received the Pulitzer prize. A well written but disturbing book. As a New Englander who had never been south of the Mason dixon line until the late 50's, I had no idea such things took place in our country. After reading, I understand much better some of the racial tensions in our modern society. A "must read"
    • 5/5
      This very important work, by the Wall Street Journal's Atlanta bureau chief, documents how slavery in fact continued for four generations after the Civil War, until World War II, when it became clear that Japan and Germany could have a propaganda field day with the treatment of African Americans. If you wonder why race relations are still touchy in America, this is a good place to start.
    • 5/5
      Beyond excellent. What Blackmon refers to as the Age of Neoslavery has been poorly understood by generations of Americans – often willfully so. As someone who considered himself reasonably well informed about post-Reconstruction political realities and Jim Crow segregation, I found in “Slavery by Another Name” a lesson in my own ignorance that was impossible to ignore. In his epilogue, he writes: “Certainly the great record of forced labor across the South 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 – well into the childhoods of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age.” The story of that 20th century slavery is gruesome for many, many reasons… and it deserves to be heard.
    • 5/5
      This is a powerful book and my vocabulary is too small to begin to do it the justice it deserves. This was not easy to read but I couldn't stop talking about it as I read it. This book should be on the REQUIRED READING list of everyone in this country, of all ages and colors. We seem to have repeated horrific behavior to other human beings throughout history, and it just continues. How can this be hidden and repeated again and again? I was fascinated with the epilogue where some of the descendants on both sides---although there are more than two sides in all of this---varied so much on wanting to know the past and wanting to forget it or remain uninformed.And I wonder what it means that this country became great, whatever "greatness" means, in part only on the backs of slave labor. How does that make this country great? The companies that evolved from this horrible past think, for the most part, that it should remain in the past--it doesn't relate to what they are now. I don't know how you can ever get over all of this. How can all of this be forgiven---not just the act(s) but the inability to ever put a stop to it. Unforgivable on the part of all.
    • 4/5
      Covering the time between the Civil War and WWII, Blackmon's book investigates the practice of slavery through a system of corrupt local officials who charged African Americans with trumped-up crimes and then sold them as labor to company mines & farms. It primarily covers instances that occurred in Georgia and Alabama between the late 1800's and early 1900's, although companies and individuals continued to benefit from this abhorrent "legal" slavery up to World War II (when FDR realized the Axis powers were using the secondary status of African Americans as propaganda for their efforts). It's a meticulously researched effort and well worthy of its recent Pulitzer, exposing a shameful period of our history that's written in many textbooks as being post-slavery and, therefore, more enlightened in terms of race relations.
    • 4/5
      Some of the parts of this book are tedious and not apparently pertinent, but when one finishes the book even those tedious parts are shown to be pertinent. Basically, the author researches the system, especially common in Alabama, whereby black men were railroaded to being convicted of a petty crime and then given into the power of white men who would require them to work for them or others usually under bad conditions. Especially interesting is the effort to convict persons of peonage in 1903, and how the justice system in Alabama was a system for injustice and horror. I would have preferred the author to be more objective and let the facts speak for themselves rather than his telling us how bad things were--it would have made for a better book.
    • 5/5
      Makes real the devastation of reconstruction, in particular the use of county and state justice systems to enslave black men under even worse conditions than was usual in slavery, since even the property stake in their well-being was not there since there were always more men to be gotten from jail.
    • 5/5
      Excellent!If you only have time to read one chapter, make it Chapter IV Green Cottenham's World.