Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

ISBN-13: 9780385722704 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 496 str.

Douglas A. Blackmon

Opis

A Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the "Age of Neoslavery," the American period following the Emancipation Proclamation in which convicts, mostly black men, were "leased" through forced labor camps operated by state and federal governments.

In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history--an "Age of Neoslavery" that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Douglas A. 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 shortly thereafter. By turns moving, sobering, and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

Recenzje

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

Spis treści

Table of Contents:
A Note on Language
Introduction: The Bricks We Stand On
PART ONE: THE SLOW POISON
I. THE WEDDING
Fruits of Freedom
II. AN INDUSTRIAL SLAVERY
"Niggers is cheap."
III. SLAVERY'S INCREASE
"Day after day we looked Death in the face & was afraid to speak."
IV. GREEN COTTENHAM'S WORLD
"The negro dies faster"
PART TWO: HARVEST OF AN UNFINISHED WAR
V. THE SLAVE FARM OF JOHN PACE
"I don't owe you anything."
VI. SLAVERY IS NOT A CRIME
"We shall have to kill a thousand...to get them back to their places."
VII. THE INDICTMENTS
"I was whipped nearly every day."
VIII. A SUMMER OF TRIALS
"The master treated the slave unmercifully."
IX. A RIVER OF ANGER
The South Is "an armed camp."
X. THE DISAPPROBATION OF GOD
"It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes."
XI. SLAVERY AFFIRMED
"Cheap cotton depends on cheap niggers."
XII. NEW SOUTH RISING
"This great corporation."
PART THREE: THE FINAL CHAPTER OF AMERICAN SLAVERY
XIII. THE ARREST OF GREEN COTTENHAM
A War of Atrocities
XIV. ANATOMY OF A SLAVE MINE
"Degraded to a plane lower than the brutes."
XV. EVERYWHERE WAS DEATH
"Negro Quietly Swung Up by an Armed Mob...All is quiet."
XVI. ATLANTA, THE SOUTH'S FINEST CITY
"I will murder you if you don't do that work."
XVII. FREEDOM
"in the United States on cannot sell himself"
EPILOGUE
The Ephemera of Catastrophe
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

O autorze

A native of Leland, Mississippi, Doug Blackmon is the Wall Street Journal's Atlanta Bureau Chief. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and their two children.