This Pulitzer Prize winner (and the basis for an upcoming PBS documentary) is the most horrifying book I’ve ever read.  Written by Douglas A. Blackmon, a son of the South who’s now the bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal in Atlanta, it destroys the myth that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation put an end to slavery in 1863 and replaces it with the reality of a nightmare that for millions of African American families lasted almost another 100 years.  Don’t try read this book in bed — it’s hard to sleep when you’re manacled to visions of beatings, lynchings, murders and rape, and chained to the biggest lie in our nation’s history.I grew up in the South, in Atlanta, twenty years ahead of Doug Blackmon’s rearing in the Mississippi Delta, so I knew everything about race in America.  Or at least I did until I tagged along with my wife to a reading by Blackmon at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library in downtown Washington, DC during Black History Month.  Her book club was reading Slavery by Another Name. The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II and   she’d been so absorbed in her fat paperback that I wanted to find out why.

 Here’s a couple of nut graphs on what Blackmon said that night:

 At the end of the Civil War, most of the freed slaves in America stayed that way for less than a heartbeat.  The ever-resourceful white planters and farmers in the black belt quickly flim-flammed or intimidated them into to contracts as sharecroppers and tenants and kept them in involuntary servitude even as they were granted the right to vote and some of their leaders were being appointed or elected to public office.  White county officials and judges throughout the states of the Confederacy supported the new system by hunting down those who tried to escape, and arresting those who weren’t attached to plantations, prosecuting them on trumped up charges, then selling them back into a life of forced labor and brutal punishment, ostensibly to pay off court costs and fines associated with their “criminal” acts.  Their purchasers found ways to prevent them from ever paying off their “debts” and once in the system, you never escaped.

 Over the next forty years, neo-slavery grew and spread and by the turn of the century, hundreds of thousands of African American men, and some women, were imprisoned in timber and turpentine camps, coal mines and steel mills, as well as in the cotton fields of the Deep South.  Forced labor, involuntary servitude, and prison labor were the new names for a system that mushroomed as industrial development added to the labor needs of the region.  This “slavery by another name” continued until the 1940s when our federal government found new roles for African American men as cooks, laborers, lackeys (and, eventually, heroes) for our armed forces fighting World War II.

 I’d heard enough from the author to compel me to read the book, and what I discovered was a unimaginable netherworld of human cruelty.  Before the Civil War, slaves were a valuable commodity, and even the most vicious plantation owners normally checked up short of crippling or destroying what was often their biggest wealth.  However, in the neo-slavery system, men and women were bought and sold for $10 or $20, so their owners never hesitated to work them until they expired or beat them to death.

Particularly horrifying were huge, filthy, vermin-infested on-site prisons in the Alabama coalfields, where manacled slaves who seldom saw the sun were fed bread and pork fat rations, whipped morning and night, and buried in mass graves when they died of exhaustion, disease, mine accidents or a pickaxe in the skull ordered by a security guard and delivered by a follow prisoner.  If there wives tried to visit or mourn them, sexual submission was their only gate pass, and the guards were sadistic rapers.

 Blackmon uses narratives of individual slaves and their families to tell his awful story, and he weaves them into a dramatic history of the period — the collapse of reconstruction, the total disenfranchisement of black voters, the failure of the judicial system, the advent of Jim Crow laws, the racism of Woodrow Wilson, the race riots of the 1920s, and the profiteering off slave labor by corporations like U.S. Steel.  But the matrix of this book are his well-documented descriptions of sand -coated leather straps cutting into human flesh, axe blades chopping off human limbs, and bodies of young African American men jerking in nooses tied to tree limbs or writhing in agony in funeral pyres.

 What my wife took away from the book was a strengthening of her belief that where there are no rules, no laws, no enforcement, human beings will always exploit other human beings.

 My final thought is that if every African American in our country were to read this book, we wouldn’t be facing reparations, we’d be looking at a revolution. 

 To purchase this book from America’s only unionized online bookseller, click here

 For more information, visit www.slaverybyanothername.com