Michelle Obama was raked over the coals for her comments about not being very proud of America until recently. Why, how dare her?! Who could NOT be proud of America?! Forever and always AMEN! Oh, sure, we've had our share of stumbles along the way: the Palmer Raids, Japanese internment, Rocky Flats, the Tuskegee experiments, just to name a few, but we're number ONE! Or were number one.
And now this...
I recently discovered this book, "Slavery by Another Name" by Douglas Blackmon. (cute play on the name there, Doug)
If true, it's yet another sordid saga from our glorious history. The kind of history you just don't get in school. I remember hearing "stories" about this years ago, but had no "confirmation" until now. I do wonder how many blacks were caught up in this despicable system? Blackmon says hundreds of thousands. We'll probably never know. Does anyone wonder why a large percentage of blacks don't trust the US Judicial system?
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, brickyards, 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.
SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME is a moving, sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.
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