Piece Description

Douglas Blackmon, of the Wall Street Journal, has written a newsman’s history book with staggering implications about racial reality in America today.  Slavery by Another Name won the 2009 Pulitzer for non-fiction, and shows in great detail the system of trumped-up charges for vagrancy and loitering -- essentially "guilty of being black" charges -- to feed a system of prison labor that was in some ways more brutal than ante-bellum slavery.

The heart of the story is that slavery in the American South ended not with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the end of the Civil War, but at the onset of World War 2. That is: state-sanctioned brutal and abusive bondage ended less than 70 years ago, well within the living memory of millions of Americans, black and white. The gap between “slave time” and now is not five or six generations, but one or two at most.

Slavery by Another Name is Doug Blackmon’s complete revision of the Jim Crow story, with an astonishing breadth and depth of documentation and none of the old sugar-coating or vagueness around phrases like peonage and sharecropping. “Neo-slavery” was the hard-core of a public-private system that undid the freedoms that came with Reconstruction for most of thirty years after the Civil War, and then enforced a new reign of terror over all African-Americans in the South.