Through painstaking detail and heartbreaking stories, this book sheds light on the systematic, calculated, and willful creation of a system of "neo-slavery" that replaced slavery after it was supposedly abolished. What this book exposes is profoundly disturbing, and is a devastating indictment of what the United States of America purposely did to its new black "citizens". If it were possible to forgive the original sin of slavery, it is impossible to forgive what occurred after slavery. It is a crime against humanity that has never been fully exposed, acknowledged, prosecuted, or punished.
Slavery was not abolished. It was simply (and predictably) replaced by an even more devastating system of legal, codified oppression that made the incarceration of "free" black men, a desirable and profitable practice, and a central component of economic prosperity for white businesses. "Laws" were created specifically to fine and arrest black men so their "debt" could be sold to white businesses who would in turn use the men as forced laborers. The demand for this cheap labor was insatiable. Black men were arrested for "talking too loud" in front of a white woman, or being "disrespectful". Many were arrested without even being charged - that's how blatant the practice was. Vagrancy laws were also created and used for the sole purpose of "rounding up" as many black men as possible to feed this new system of slavery. Many of these men died working in unspeakably brutal conditions in mines, foundries, plantations, and railroads. This system was a brutal manifestation of how whites viewed blacks, a view that, like it or not, is still at the core of American consciousness.
This book is a painful, depressing, but necessary read. It should be required reading in high school and college.
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II Reprint Edition, Kindle Edition
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“Shocking. . . . Eviscerates one of our schoolchildren's most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War.”—The New York Times“An astonishing book. . . . It will challenge and change your understanding of what we were as Americans-and of what we are.”—Chicago Tribune “The genius of Blackmon's book is that it illuminates both the real human tragedy and the profoundly corrupting nature of the Old South slavery as it transformed to establish a New South social order.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution“A formidably researched, powerfully written, wrenchingly detailed narrative.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
Dennis Boutsikaris (born December 21, 1952) is an American two-time Obie-Award winning character actor. He is a Broadway Actor and frequent television guest star and leading man in made-for-TV movies. He is also an Audie Award winning narrator of audiobooks.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I
THE WEDDING
Fruits of Freedom
Freedom wasn’t yet three years old when the wedding day came. Henry Cottinham and Mary Bishop had been chattel slaves until the momentous final days of the Civil War, as nameless in the eyes of the law as cows in the field. All their lives, they could no more have obtained a marriage license than purchased a horse, a wagon, or a train ticket to freedom in the North. Then a final furious sweep of Union soldiers–in a bewildering blur of liberation and terror unleashed from a distant war–ravaged the Cahaba River valley.
Henry was suddenly a man. Mary was a woman, a slave girl no more. Here they stood, bride and groom, before John Wesley Starr, the coarse old preacher who a blink of an eye before had spent his Sundays teaching white people that slavery was the manifestation of a human order ordained by God, and preaching to black people that theirs was a glorified place among the chickens and the pigs.
To most people along the Cahaba River, January 1868 hardly seemed an auspicious time to marry. It was raw, cold, and hungry. In every direction from the Cottingham Loop, the simple dirt road alongside which lived three generations of former slaves and their former owners, the land and its horizons were muted and bitter. The valley, the undulating hills of Bibb County, even the bridges and fords across the hundred-yard-wide Cahaba sweeping down from the last foothills of the Appalachians and into the flat fertile plains to the south, were still wrecked from the savage cavalry raids of Union Gen. James H. Wilson. Just two springs earlier, in April 1865, his horsemen had descended on Alabama in billowing swarms. The enfeebled southern army defending the state scattered before his advance. Even the great Confederate cavalry genius Nathan Bedford Forrest, his regiments eviscerated by four years of war, was swept aside with impunity. Wilson crushed the last functioning industrial complex of the Confederacy and left Alabama in a state of complete chaos. Not three years later, the valley remained a twisted ruin. Fallow fields. Burned barns. Machinery rusting at the bottoms of wells. Horses and mules dead or lost. The people, black and white, braced for a hard, anxious winter.
From the front porch of Elisha Cottingham’s house, two stories stacked of hand-hewn logs and chinked with red clay dug at the river’s edge, the old man looked out on his portion of that barren vista. The land had long ago lost nearly all resemblance to the massive exuberance of the frontier forest he stumbled upon fifty years earlier. Now, only the boundaries and contours remained of its carefully tended bounty of the last years before the war.
He had picked this place for the angle of the land. It unfolded from the house in one long sheet of soil, falling gradually away from his rough-planked front steps. For nearly five hundred yards, the slope descended smoothly toward the deep river, layered when Elisha first arrived with a foot of fertile humus. On the east and south, the great field was hemmed in by a gushing creek, boiling up over turtle-shell shapes of limestone protruding from the banks, growing deeper and wider, falling faster and more furiously–strong enough to spin a small grist mill–before it turned to the west and suddenly plunged into the Cahaba. He named the stream Cottingham Creek. An abounding sense of possibility exuded from the place Elisha had chosen, land on which he intuitively knew a resourceful man could make his own indelible mark.
Yet in the aftermath of the war Elisha Cottingham, like countless other southern whites in 1868, must have felt some dread sense of an atomized future. They knew that the perils of coming times constituted a far greater jeopardy than the war just lost. A society they had engineered from wilderness had been defeated and humiliated; the human livestock on which they had relied for generations now threatened to rule in their place. In the logical
spectrum of possibilities for what might yet follow, Elisha had to consider the terrifying–and ultimately realized–possibility that all human effort invested at the confluence of Cottingham Creek and the Cahaba River would be erased. The alacrity that infused their achievement was lost. More than a century later, the last Cottingham would be gone. No trace of the big house, the slave cabins, or a waterwheel would survive. None of the fields hacked from the forest remained at plow. Only the creek and sun-bleached gravestones clustered atop the hill still bore the Cottingham name.
Elisha had arrived at the banks of the Cahaba, barely a man himself, in an Alabama territory that was still untamed. It was 1817, and Elisha and his three brothers faced a dense wilderness governed by the uncertainties of Indian territory and the vagaries of an American nation debating the precepts of eminent domain that would ultimately expand its borders from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.1 Alabama would not be a state for two more years.
Elisha’s brother Charles soon decamped to the newly founded county seat of Centreville, where in short order shallow-draft riverboats would land and a trading center would be established. (2) Another brother, William, moved farther south. But Elisha and his younger sibling, John, stayed in the wilderness on the Cahaba. In the four decades before the Civil War, they staked out land, brought in wives, cleared the lush woodlands, sired bountiful families, and planted season upon season of cotton. The engines of their enterprises were black slaves. In the early years, they imported them to Alabama and later bred more themselves–including Henry–from the African stock they bought at auction or from peripatetic slave peddlers who arrived unbidden in springtime with traces of ragged, shackled black men and women, carrying signs advertising “Negroes for Sale.” Manning farms strung along a looping wagon road, the brothers and their slaves cleared the land, raised cabins, and built the church where they would pray. Harnessing their black labor to the rich black land, the Cottingham brothers became prosperous and comfortable.
Some neighbors called the Cottingham section of the county Pratt’s Ferry, for the man who lived on the other side of the Cahaba and poled a raft across the water for a few pennies a ride. But the Cottinghams, Godfearing people who gathered a congregation of Methodists in the wilderness almost as soon as they had felled the first timber, adopted for their homestead a name marking the work not of man but of the Almighty. Where the clear cold creek gurgled into the Cahaba, a massive bulge of limestone rose from the water, imposing itself over a wide, sweeping curve in the river. To the Cottinghams, this place was Riverbend.
The Cottinghams demanded a harsh life of labor from their bondsmen. Otherwise, what point was there to the tremendous investment required of owning slaves. Yet, especially in contrast to the industrial slavery that would eventually bud nearby, life on the Cottingham plantation reflected the biblical understanding that cruelty to any creature was a sin–that black slaves, even if not quite men, were at least thinly made in the image of God.
Set among more than twenty barns and other farm buildings, Henry and the rest of the slaves lived in crude but warm cabins built of roughhewn logs chinked with mud. Heat came from rock fireplaces with chimneys made of sticks and mud. Elisha recorded the ownership of thirteen slaves in 1860, including four men in their twenties and thirties and six other male teenagers. A single twenty-year-old female lived among the slaves, along with two young boys and a seven-year-old girl. (3)
Given the traditions of isolated rural farms, Elisha’s grandson Oliver, raised there on the Cottingham farm, would have been a lifelong playmate of the slave boy nearly his same age, named Henry. (4) When Elisha Cottingham’s daughter Rebecca married a neighbor, Benjamin Battle, in 1852, Elisha presented to her as a wedding gift the slave girl who likely had been her companion and servant. “In consideration of the natural love and affection which I bear to my daughter,” Elisha wrote, I give her “a certain negro girl named Frances, about 14 years old.” (5)
Those slaves who died on the Cottingham place were buried with neat ceremony in plots marked by rough unlabeled stones just a few feet from where Elisha himself would be laid to rest in 1870–clearly acknowledged as members in some manner of a larger human family recognized by the master. Indeed, Elisha buried his slaves nearer to him by far than he did Rev. Starr, the man who ministered to all of the souls on the Cottingham place. The Starr family plot, with its evangelical inscriptions and sad roster of infant dead, was set down the hill and toward the road, even more vulnerable to the creeping oblivion of time.
Long generations hence, descendants of slaves from the plantation still recounted a vague legend of the generosity of a Cottingham master–giving permission to marry to a favored mulatto named Green. That slave, who would remain at Elisha’s side past emancipation and until the old master’s death, would become the namesake of Henry and Mary’s youngest son.
But even as Elisha had allowed a strain of tenderness to co-reside with the brutally circumscribed lives of his slaves, he never lost sight of their fundamental definition–as cattle. They were creatures bought or bred for the production of wealth. Even as he deeded to daughter Rebecca the slave Frances, Elisha was careful to enumerate in the document the recognition that he was giving up not just one slave girl, but a whole line of future stock who might have brought him cash or labor. Along with Frances, Elisha was careful to specify, his newlywed daughter received all “future increase of the girl.” (6)
The marriage of Henry, now twenty years old, and Mary, one year his junior, in 18... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
THE WEDDING
Fruits of Freedom
Freedom wasn’t yet three years old when the wedding day came. Henry Cottinham and Mary Bishop had been chattel slaves until the momentous final days of the Civil War, as nameless in the eyes of the law as cows in the field. All their lives, they could no more have obtained a marriage license than purchased a horse, a wagon, or a train ticket to freedom in the North. Then a final furious sweep of Union soldiers–in a bewildering blur of liberation and terror unleashed from a distant war–ravaged the Cahaba River valley.
Henry was suddenly a man. Mary was a woman, a slave girl no more. Here they stood, bride and groom, before John Wesley Starr, the coarse old preacher who a blink of an eye before had spent his Sundays teaching white people that slavery was the manifestation of a human order ordained by God, and preaching to black people that theirs was a glorified place among the chickens and the pigs.
To most people along the Cahaba River, January 1868 hardly seemed an auspicious time to marry. It was raw, cold, and hungry. In every direction from the Cottingham Loop, the simple dirt road alongside which lived three generations of former slaves and their former owners, the land and its horizons were muted and bitter. The valley, the undulating hills of Bibb County, even the bridges and fords across the hundred-yard-wide Cahaba sweeping down from the last foothills of the Appalachians and into the flat fertile plains to the south, were still wrecked from the savage cavalry raids of Union Gen. James H. Wilson. Just two springs earlier, in April 1865, his horsemen had descended on Alabama in billowing swarms. The enfeebled southern army defending the state scattered before his advance. Even the great Confederate cavalry genius Nathan Bedford Forrest, his regiments eviscerated by four years of war, was swept aside with impunity. Wilson crushed the last functioning industrial complex of the Confederacy and left Alabama in a state of complete chaos. Not three years later, the valley remained a twisted ruin. Fallow fields. Burned barns. Machinery rusting at the bottoms of wells. Horses and mules dead or lost. The people, black and white, braced for a hard, anxious winter.
From the front porch of Elisha Cottingham’s house, two stories stacked of hand-hewn logs and chinked with red clay dug at the river’s edge, the old man looked out on his portion of that barren vista. The land had long ago lost nearly all resemblance to the massive exuberance of the frontier forest he stumbled upon fifty years earlier. Now, only the boundaries and contours remained of its carefully tended bounty of the last years before the war.
He had picked this place for the angle of the land. It unfolded from the house in one long sheet of soil, falling gradually away from his rough-planked front steps. For nearly five hundred yards, the slope descended smoothly toward the deep river, layered when Elisha first arrived with a foot of fertile humus. On the east and south, the great field was hemmed in by a gushing creek, boiling up over turtle-shell shapes of limestone protruding from the banks, growing deeper and wider, falling faster and more furiously–strong enough to spin a small grist mill–before it turned to the west and suddenly plunged into the Cahaba. He named the stream Cottingham Creek. An abounding sense of possibility exuded from the place Elisha had chosen, land on which he intuitively knew a resourceful man could make his own indelible mark.
Yet in the aftermath of the war Elisha Cottingham, like countless other southern whites in 1868, must have felt some dread sense of an atomized future. They knew that the perils of coming times constituted a far greater jeopardy than the war just lost. A society they had engineered from wilderness had been defeated and humiliated; the human livestock on which they had relied for generations now threatened to rule in their place. In the logical
spectrum of possibilities for what might yet follow, Elisha had to consider the terrifying–and ultimately realized–possibility that all human effort invested at the confluence of Cottingham Creek and the Cahaba River would be erased. The alacrity that infused their achievement was lost. More than a century later, the last Cottingham would be gone. No trace of the big house, the slave cabins, or a waterwheel would survive. None of the fields hacked from the forest remained at plow. Only the creek and sun-bleached gravestones clustered atop the hill still bore the Cottingham name.
Elisha had arrived at the banks of the Cahaba, barely a man himself, in an Alabama territory that was still untamed. It was 1817, and Elisha and his three brothers faced a dense wilderness governed by the uncertainties of Indian territory and the vagaries of an American nation debating the precepts of eminent domain that would ultimately expand its borders from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.1 Alabama would not be a state for two more years.
Elisha’s brother Charles soon decamped to the newly founded county seat of Centreville, where in short order shallow-draft riverboats would land and a trading center would be established. (2) Another brother, William, moved farther south. But Elisha and his younger sibling, John, stayed in the wilderness on the Cahaba. In the four decades before the Civil War, they staked out land, brought in wives, cleared the lush woodlands, sired bountiful families, and planted season upon season of cotton. The engines of their enterprises were black slaves. In the early years, they imported them to Alabama and later bred more themselves–including Henry–from the African stock they bought at auction or from peripatetic slave peddlers who arrived unbidden in springtime with traces of ragged, shackled black men and women, carrying signs advertising “Negroes for Sale.” Manning farms strung along a looping wagon road, the brothers and their slaves cleared the land, raised cabins, and built the church where they would pray. Harnessing their black labor to the rich black land, the Cottingham brothers became prosperous and comfortable.
Some neighbors called the Cottingham section of the county Pratt’s Ferry, for the man who lived on the other side of the Cahaba and poled a raft across the water for a few pennies a ride. But the Cottinghams, Godfearing people who gathered a congregation of Methodists in the wilderness almost as soon as they had felled the first timber, adopted for their homestead a name marking the work not of man but of the Almighty. Where the clear cold creek gurgled into the Cahaba, a massive bulge of limestone rose from the water, imposing itself over a wide, sweeping curve in the river. To the Cottinghams, this place was Riverbend.
The Cottinghams demanded a harsh life of labor from their bondsmen. Otherwise, what point was there to the tremendous investment required of owning slaves. Yet, especially in contrast to the industrial slavery that would eventually bud nearby, life on the Cottingham plantation reflected the biblical understanding that cruelty to any creature was a sin–that black slaves, even if not quite men, were at least thinly made in the image of God.
Set among more than twenty barns and other farm buildings, Henry and the rest of the slaves lived in crude but warm cabins built of roughhewn logs chinked with mud. Heat came from rock fireplaces with chimneys made of sticks and mud. Elisha recorded the ownership of thirteen slaves in 1860, including four men in their twenties and thirties and six other male teenagers. A single twenty-year-old female lived among the slaves, along with two young boys and a seven-year-old girl. (3)
Given the traditions of isolated rural farms, Elisha’s grandson Oliver, raised there on the Cottingham farm, would have been a lifelong playmate of the slave boy nearly his same age, named Henry. (4) When Elisha Cottingham’s daughter Rebecca married a neighbor, Benjamin Battle, in 1852, Elisha presented to her as a wedding gift the slave girl who likely had been her companion and servant. “In consideration of the natural love and affection which I bear to my daughter,” Elisha wrote, I give her “a certain negro girl named Frances, about 14 years old.” (5)
Those slaves who died on the Cottingham place were buried with neat ceremony in plots marked by rough unlabeled stones just a few feet from where Elisha himself would be laid to rest in 1870–clearly acknowledged as members in some manner of a larger human family recognized by the master. Indeed, Elisha buried his slaves nearer to him by far than he did Rev. Starr, the man who ministered to all of the souls on the Cottingham place. The Starr family plot, with its evangelical inscriptions and sad roster of infant dead, was set down the hill and toward the road, even more vulnerable to the creeping oblivion of time.
Long generations hence, descendants of slaves from the plantation still recounted a vague legend of the generosity of a Cottingham master–giving permission to marry to a favored mulatto named Green. That slave, who would remain at Elisha’s side past emancipation and until the old master’s death, would become the namesake of Henry and Mary’s youngest son.
But even as Elisha had allowed a strain of tenderness to co-reside with the brutally circumscribed lives of his slaves, he never lost sight of their fundamental definition–as cattle. They were creatures bought or bred for the production of wealth. Even as he deeded to daughter Rebecca the slave Frances, Elisha was careful to enumerate in the document the recognition that he was giving up not just one slave girl, but a whole line of future stock who might have brought him cash or labor. Along with Frances, Elisha was careful to specify, his newlywed daughter received all “future increase of the girl.” (6)
The marriage of Henry, now twenty years old, and Mary, one year his junior, in 18... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Wall Street Journal bureau chief Blackmon gives a groundbreaking and disturbing account of a sordid chapter in American history—the lease (essentially the sale) of convicts to commercial interests between the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th. Usually, the criminal offense was loosely defined vagrancy or even changing employers without permission. The initial sentence was brutal enough; the actual penalty, reserved almost exclusively for black men, was a form of slavery in one of hundreds of forced labor camps operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small time entrepreneurs and provincial farmers. Into this history, Blackmon weaves the story of Green Cottenham, who was charged with riding a freight train without a ticket, in 1908 and was sentenced to three months of hard labor for Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel. Cottenham's sentence was extended an additional three months and six days because he was unable to pay fines then leveraged on criminals. Blackmon's book reveals in devastating detail the legal and commercial forces that created this neoslavery along with deeply moving and totally appalling personal testimonies of survivors. Every incident in this book is true, he writes; one wishes it were not so. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product details
- ASIN : B001NLKT24
- Publisher : Anchor; Reprint edition (December 27, 2008)
- Publication date : December 27, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 3559 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 498 pages
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The Civil War did not end the institution of slavery. Instead, slavery shape shifted into practices that were even worse. Practices that continued until WWII, before shape shifting again. Even in the 1970's, I saw "white only" signs in Mississippi . As long as we fail to recognize the historical truth, discrimination will not end.
I have this book four stars, because of comments made about the Holocaust. The rich Jew trope reflects classic Anti-Judaism rhetoric. A very small number of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were wealthy. Most had lived in abject poverty for centuries. The author really needs to study the history of Jews to see even more shades of slavery.
I have this book four stars, because of comments made about the Holocaust. The rich Jew trope reflects classic Anti-Judaism rhetoric. A very small number of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were wealthy. Most had lived in abject poverty for centuries. The author really needs to study the history of Jews to see even more shades of slavery.
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Slavery by Another Name is one of the most difficult books I have read in my life. It is probably second in line to The Rape of Nanking by the late Iris Chang, about Japanese atrocities in 1937 during its invasion and occupation of that city.
We have all heard opinions by many that because the Civil War freed African-Americans from the yoke of slavery and while Jim Crow and other segregationist laws may have hindered their civil rights, black Americans nevertheless enjoyed the basic rights to make a living and improve their circumstances. This book certainly puts the lie to those opinions, at least in the states of the old Confederacy. As the very title of the book implies, white Southerners refused to allow African Americans to become their equals. In a forced labor system no different except in name from slavery, the South actively permitted African Americans to be charged and convicted of minor criminal offenses, often trumped-up (alleged vagrancy, speaking to white women, etc.), and then essentially sold into slavery by the states or counties to corporations and individuals to allegedly pay off their fines. Due to the profitability of the corrupt system, sheriffs and so-called justices of the peace often even kidnapped young black men who committed no crimes so the so-called law enforcement officers could receive their kickbacks when the men were sold or traded in bondage.
The conditions in the mines, factories, plantations, etc. where these men worked were horrifying. They were given scant medical treatment, were starved, whipped, water-tortured, shot, burned alive, and went through other forms of torture. Many died in truly horrendous safety conditions in the mines. I challenge anyone to read this book and claim their situation was anything other than slavery. Numerous murdered black men simply vanished without a trace without any accountability. The author’s reference to the fact that only one white man in Georgia between 1867 and 1966 was ever convicted of murdering a black man (recall also the history of lynching in that state) is proof positive of the epidemic racism in the state.
Whenever these conditions were the subject of public scrutiny, although there was initial public outrage by some (countered by outright denial by others), most Southerners seemed content to sweep the matter under the rug and decline lasting and effective oversight or reform. Even more disappointing was the proclivity of many Northerners to look the other way, believing black Americans to be second-class citizens. Only the onset of WWII caused the federal government to finally act in a decisive way to end what was almost an 80-year extension of slavery following the Civil War.
The author deserves many accolades for bringing these events to our attention. He believes this period of time should be referred to as the Age of Neoslavery. Given the passage of time since the publication of this book and the fact that this term has not caught on, I am afraid that our ephemeral historical memories have glided past this fascinating book.
Two quibbles. I thought the section dealing with the end of this forced labor system was a bit abbreviated and deserved more attention. Also, the very many instances of horror related in the book piled one atop of the other perhaps could have been edited down. Or in doing so, am I asking that individual stories of men undergoing horror should be swept aside?
An outstanding and informative book dealing with one of the worst injustices in our history. We should be ashamed but never forget.
We have all heard opinions by many that because the Civil War freed African-Americans from the yoke of slavery and while Jim Crow and other segregationist laws may have hindered their civil rights, black Americans nevertheless enjoyed the basic rights to make a living and improve their circumstances. This book certainly puts the lie to those opinions, at least in the states of the old Confederacy. As the very title of the book implies, white Southerners refused to allow African Americans to become their equals. In a forced labor system no different except in name from slavery, the South actively permitted African Americans to be charged and convicted of minor criminal offenses, often trumped-up (alleged vagrancy, speaking to white women, etc.), and then essentially sold into slavery by the states or counties to corporations and individuals to allegedly pay off their fines. Due to the profitability of the corrupt system, sheriffs and so-called justices of the peace often even kidnapped young black men who committed no crimes so the so-called law enforcement officers could receive their kickbacks when the men were sold or traded in bondage.
The conditions in the mines, factories, plantations, etc. where these men worked were horrifying. They were given scant medical treatment, were starved, whipped, water-tortured, shot, burned alive, and went through other forms of torture. Many died in truly horrendous safety conditions in the mines. I challenge anyone to read this book and claim their situation was anything other than slavery. Numerous murdered black men simply vanished without a trace without any accountability. The author’s reference to the fact that only one white man in Georgia between 1867 and 1966 was ever convicted of murdering a black man (recall also the history of lynching in that state) is proof positive of the epidemic racism in the state.
Whenever these conditions were the subject of public scrutiny, although there was initial public outrage by some (countered by outright denial by others), most Southerners seemed content to sweep the matter under the rug and decline lasting and effective oversight or reform. Even more disappointing was the proclivity of many Northerners to look the other way, believing black Americans to be second-class citizens. Only the onset of WWII caused the federal government to finally act in a decisive way to end what was almost an 80-year extension of slavery following the Civil War.
The author deserves many accolades for bringing these events to our attention. He believes this period of time should be referred to as the Age of Neoslavery. Given the passage of time since the publication of this book and the fact that this term has not caught on, I am afraid that our ephemeral historical memories have glided past this fascinating book.
Two quibbles. I thought the section dealing with the end of this forced labor system was a bit abbreviated and deserved more attention. Also, the very many instances of horror related in the book piled one atop of the other perhaps could have been edited down. Or in doing so, am I asking that individual stories of men undergoing horror should be swept aside?
An outstanding and informative book dealing with one of the worst injustices in our history. We should be ashamed but never forget.
7 people found this helpful
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Story That Must Be Told -- It will change your perspective on our history in this country!
Reviewed in the United States on October 14, 2017Verified Purchase
This book had an incredible impact on my perspective of mankind, and the racial injustices associated with the history of our country. I was entirely blind as to what transpired in the south after the civil war, and for that part, even the north's willingness to look the other way. However, after reading the book, it becomes evident that these injustices still exist today, although masked under different laws and perpetrators. This is a must read. An incredible read! A book that will no doubt change your perspective on the history of this country.
30 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2017
Verified Purchase
This book should be required reading for every American. It brings into clear focus the reality of the continuation of slavery for African Americans long after "emancipation." At very least a summary of its contents should be a chapter in every school book on American history taught in our schools. It is a hard read, but well worth the discomfort of facing the truth of our shared past of greed, violence and the shocking apathy of our leaders.
11 people found this helpful
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Ifayomi
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you think you know the history of the enslavement of Afrikan people in the US think again
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 11, 2014Verified Purchase
A superbly researched work that exposes how chattel slavery continued, on a literally industrial scale, in the United States until the 1940s. It reveals the connivance of the federal government in allowing these crimes against humanity to continue unchecked and the vast profits accumulated by individuals and corporations from the continued enslavement of Afrikan people in the US. The book reveals that it was the fear of international exposure of this continued slavery undermining US war propaganda; far more than any moral impetus that led to the federal government finally bringing slavery to an end in the US. The book is only spoiled by the refusal to support the obvious case for reparations that the text clearly makes. The author describes in methodical detail the economic basis for this mass exploitation and yet offers up the ridiculous idea of a museum as a suitable response to this vastly profitable slave industry. No surprise, but disappointing. A must read book nonetheless, particularly for Afrikan people under any illusions about what really took place in the US following the end of the Civil War.
6 people found this helpful
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Simone Brewster
5.0 out of 5 stars
The true history of America.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 13, 2018Verified Purchase
This book shines a light on the darkest corners of American history. Reminding us of what is often untold and unacknowledged, America was built on the back of slaves, and continued actively utilising slaves until 1945 under a thin guise of law. Often shocking in its frank compilation of harsh truths, it should be essential reading for all westerners, regardless of race.

John C
5.0 out of 5 stars
The land of the free?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 19, 2013Verified Purchase
I hadn't realised how cruel and sadistic one human being could be to another during peacetime. The evil treatment of black slaves by white slave owners and their minions was happening in a so-called Christian society, all in the name of making money and maintaining power. Its perpetuation into the twentieth century was made easy by corrupt laws designed to protect those holding the power. The author writes extremely well about this extremely dark period in US history. It is a fascinating book which I would highly recommend to anyone with a curiosity about oppression in society.
5 people found this helpful
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Ms. Fiona Allen
5.0 out of 5 stars
Illuminating and terrifying
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 28, 2014Verified Purchase
I had always thought I was reasonably well-informed on Black Americans' struggles for equality; Mr Blackmon's book proved just how wrong I was. I could only read it in small bite-sized sections, as the contents were so genuinely shocking, but for anyone studying history or the story of slavery, this is unmissable.
3 people found this helpful
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Calverton Bent
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth the investment
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 9, 2019Verified Purchase
Very happy with purchase and condition.
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