Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name

...A reminder of their once subordinate and helpless status, this history still cannot always be regarded as redemptive...

...Much of this widely reviewed work makes clear that the leading men and corporations of the New South, often in conjunction with northern investors, profited handsomely from forced convict labor...

...As the records of the U.S...

...they deliberately set fires and engaged in sabotage...

...If nothing else, Slavery by Another Name reminds us that the racial totalitarianism of the Deep South during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century had no equal anywhere outside of apartheid South Africa...

...many others were convicted of nothing at all...

...This was not just the province of petty “backward” entrepreneurs operating on the fringes of southern capitalism, but rather a strategic choice engaged in by the region’s leading corporate titans...

...If economic growth in the New South and apartheid South Africa rested on corporate exploitation of coerced labor, what sort of reparations or compensation might successful businesses and their corporate inheritors owe to the descendants of the victims of apartheid and convict leasing...

...Blackmon’s excellent treatment of the fee system, based on local court records like those he unearthed in the Shelby County (Alabama) Historical Society, is a powerful reminder that convict leasing was not just driven by the state’s ability to sell felony prisoners into slavery...

...The Alabama convict coal mines owned and operated by Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company (TCI), one of the New South’s most powerful corporations, underpinned an enormous industrial complex in the environs of Birmingham, Alabama (a city blacks called the “Johannesburg of America” for a reason...

...Yet he pays no attention to the profound limits faced by this extreme form of production...

...Incredibly, Blackmon claims at the conclusion of his book that “it is little surprise that the long-lingering persistence of American slavery has been so largely ignored”—but surely not by historians...

...Thus he veers between sharply drawn descriptions of the new fetters white southerners fastened on blacks and absurd caricatures of the existing historical accounts of this process...

...This comes from Jacqueline Jones’s 2003 text, Created Equal...

...Pick up any U.S...

...He is the author of Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South, published by Verso in 1996...

...Still, as Harvard law professor Martha Minow tells Blackmon in an interview, if corporations can be held liable for toxic dumping on their property engaged in by their predecessors, why not for prior toxic labor and racial practices...

...Blackmon includes some of this existing literature on southern convict labor in his bibliography...

...The key figures in the business of seizing blacks for forced labor were the county sheriffs, who “exercised their greatest power in the enforcement of debts...

...Yet his account has limitations...

...Blackmon’s work examines two closely related examples of the post–Civil War South’s interlocking criminal justice and forced labor systems...

...Still, although no historians today deny the extreme nature of southern racial injustice, there is a trend afoot to negate its exceptionality...

...When Blackmon takes us on a harrowing journey inside the convict mines he spares little detail...

...Unable to sell coal in saturated markets, the owners of convict mines found they still had to house, feed, secure, and clothe their imprisoned labor force, for which they had already paid...

...Any unknown African American passing through a small town was in imminent danger of arrest...

...As anyone who has been in a college classroom recently could tell you, no reputable scholar has maintained such an argument about the alleged postwar black “crime wave” for at least a generation, perhaps two, maybe even three...

...BOOKS Remembering Joe Turner: Neo­slavery in the South ALEX LICHTENSTEIN Slavery by Another Name: The Re­Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon Anchor Books, 2009 468 pp., $16.95 As the playwright and chronicler of twentiethcentury African American life August Wilson recognized, the modern experience of forced labor haunted the black imagination long after the abolition of slavery...

...Indeed, Blackmon argues that when challenged by federal courts, the informal web of arrests, plea bargains, fees, and enslavement merely became formalized, receiving the official imprimatur of the local courts...

...Slavery masquerading as penal sanction lasted for seventy-five years in the Deep South following the overthrow of Reconstruction, that is, right until the Second World War...

...As Blackmon observes, corporate officials usually disclaim any responsibility for abhorrent racial practices that took place generations ago, before their business had even absorbed the company built on the wealth derived from prison labor...

...Those who had quit an abusive employer were convicted of “breaking a contract” or securing a loan under false pretenses...

...By insisting that persistent black economic inequality can be traced just as easily to the era of “neo-slavery” as to its antebellum predecessor, Blackmon reminds readers that the rationale for some form of redress for unrequited toil—for example, affirmative action—is rooted much closer in time to our own day than many white Americans often care to acknowledge...

...They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone Ohhh Lordy… Got my man and gone Come with forty links of chain Ohhh Lordy Got my man and gone So sings Wilson’s “root doctor” in the play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone...

...but writes as if it didn’t exist...

...He’d go out hunting and bring back forty men at a time,” Wilson’s vagabond from the chain gang, Herald Loomis, recalls...

...The first is the impetus given to Alabama’s nascent coal, iron, and steel industries by the provision of convict labor through the state’s convict leasing system...

...Ultimately, the system of peonage remained immune to federal eradication, at least until the Second World War began to erode the premium placed on cheap cotton and rural black labor...

...Blackmon’s epilogue poses a question that has roiled post-apartheid South Africa as well as the post–civil rights United States...

...Resented by many whites, federal attempts to enforce anti-peonage statutes during the first decades of the twentieth century helped unleash a reign of racial terror across the rural southland, where, Blackmon notes, “no black person living outside the explicit protection of whites could again feel fully secure...

...Enterprising capitalists seeking cheap and pliant labor in a hurry leased felony prisoners from the state and put them to work in coal mines, coke ovens, brickyards, and turpentine camps...

...Their works show that whites used the South’s criminal justice to re-impose forced labor on freed slaves, to discipline rural black workers, and to use terror to bolster white supremacy...

...the luckier ones had little choice but to bind themselves out to either a planter who paid the fees or a labor broker who might sell them to the mine owners anyway...

...For example, he follows up his excellent account of the fee system with the ludicrous assertion that “most scholars of American history have accepted that the repressive legal measures and violence of the post–Civil war era were the result … of lawless behavior of freed slaves...

...Combined with the tradition in local courts “of treating a man’s labor as currency,” southern Joe Turners created the legal mechanisms by which sheriffs’ and court fees, combined with fines for petty crimes, became a powerful lever with which to coerce black labor...

...While whites, particularly those whose families may have profited from convict leasing, are naturally reluctant to dig up the past, Blackmon concludes that blacks as well often want to avoid the subject...

...They refused to meet with him...

...Read in conjunction with recent accounts of the tremendous impact of the “prison-industrial complex” and the growing privatization of prisons on African American working-class communities by Bruce Western, Ruth Gilmore, Jonathan Simon, and Glenn Loury, Slavery by Another Name provides historical depth to the current crisis of imprisonment, joblessness, and seemingly ineradicable poverty in these urban neighborhoods...

...Even more frustrating for coal operators was the inflexibility of this labor force during economic downturns...

...Moreover, in a more recent era that has seen a massive increase in incarceration, much of it racialized, Blackmon’s book offers a salutary reminder—if any was needed—that the majority of prisoners caught up in the convict lease’s dragnet were not criminals, but rather victims of a police and judiciary system that declared nearly all black public behavior as potentially criminal...

...Blackmon tracked down some of the descendants of a family that made the journey from slavery to freedom, and back to convict slavery again...

...White southerners, of course, fell back on the “bad apple” theory, dismissing any allegation of systematic efforts to use the justice system to enslave blacks...

...Labor conditions in the mines proved hellish, and guards freely wielded the lash to enforce the prisoners’ daily “task” of coal tonnage...

...Thus Blackmon is able to offer concrete details from over a thousand convictions recorded in the Shelby County courthouse, nearly all of them African Americans...

...This entente of “Big Mules” and “Black Belt,” the coalition of cotton and steel, mirrored that found in other labor-repressive social orders: iron and rye in Prussia, gold and maize in the Transvaal...

...Yet southern whites—and many northerners as well—continued to insist that the shocking cases of peonage uncovered by DOJ investigators were aberrations and could even be blamed on “an ignorant and lowly people settled in isolated regions where local courts … are often inefficient and corrupt,” in the words of southern progressive Edgar Gardner Murphy...

...their productivity was low, notwithstanding the constant fear of punishment...

...A large chunk of the book is a detailed—and gripping—account of the federal peonage cases brought against fifteen farmers, justices of the peace, and local magistrates in rural Alabama in 1903...

...Some of the best chapters in the book describe in sickening detail the development of the “fee system” in southern courts and the growing use of the rudimentary local criminal justice system as a means of recruiting forced labor...

...Blackmon joins the literally dozens of historians (including, I admit, myself), who have provided a remarkably complete picture of the brutalities and depravity of convict leasing in the South...

...Department of Justice peonage investigations suggest, the simple query by a justice of the peace of “Nigger, have you got any money...

...The semi-mythical “Joe Turner” was a “mancatcher,” who, in the first decade of the twentieth century, rounded up poor black sharecroppers who fell afoul of the law and sold them into slavery as “punishment for a crime,” as the Thirteenth Amendment says...

...And keep them seven years...

...But the stories Blackmon tells—the absolute indifference to the humanity of black people, their complete political powerlessness in the face of extreme repression, and the terrifying helplessness of African Americans before the putative agents of the state as well as any white person who challenged their very presence— differ from northern racism in kind as well as degree...

...Once fines and costs had been assessed, a judge might sentence his victim to the mines...

...Convict leasing had a compelling predecessor in the system of “hiring out” slaves to industrialists, which taught antebellum businessmen “that masses of black laborers… could be powerfully leveraged in commerce...

...Yet it would have been useful if he had emphasized as well how the convict system thus helped cement an alliance between the new industrialist elite central to the South’s iron and steel interests and the landholding nabobs of the downstate cotton districts...

...They loaded coal carts with slate...

...The unsurprising consequences of this vicious system of injustice were scorn for the rule of law and the judicial process on both sides of the color line, and a powerful reinforcement of the kind of brutal paternalism reminiscent of slavery...

...The nexus of local criminal justice and debt peonage proved impervious to legal reform...

...He focuses on the operations of Alabama’s neo-slavery at the two poles of its existence, the burgeoning industrial complex in the Birmingham District and the isolated rural plantation counties in the state’s “Black Belt...

...As he acknowledges, this part of the past is too painful for some African American families...

...of these a quarter went to the mines, owned by the New South’s preeminent industrial corporation, TCI...

...Still, in the drive toward rapid industrialization that possessed the New South’s ambitious business class, forced industrial labor took on an entirely new dimension, now “hired out” by the state’s penal system rather than by a slaveholder...

...The United States,” Blackmon, asserts, “must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, did not end until 1945...

...Alex Lichtenstein teaches American history at Florida International University...

...As Bynum Walker the root doctor laments to poor Herald Loomis, Joe Turner’s “got you bound up to where you can’t sing your own song...

...Convictions for “false pretenses” continued, although now local court dockets duly recorded the charges, pleas, trials, and convictions...

...Since the corporation paid a fixed price to the state per convict, these workers were expendable...

...He concludes that we need to reckon with “its intimate connections to present-day wealth and the depth of its injury to millions of black Americans...

...By then, a global war against fascism made the persistence of slavery in the rural South a potentially acute international embarrassment...

...By 1909, a decade of federal peonage prosecutions in Alabama had led to forty-three indictments, but only four sentences resulting in jail time and only $300 in fines...

...Convicts were not good workers...

...Here is his most original contribution...

...Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Slavery by Another Name, examines in all its brutal detail the stubborn persistence of this “neo-slavery,” as he calls it, made possible by the gaping loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment...

...TCI’s and other corporations’ successful growth in this era rested on their ability to engross thousands of felony convicts from the state’s penal system, but as Blackmon shows, these enterprises also benefited from the local administration of “justice” in Alabama’s rural and small town misdemeanor courts...

...Steel in 1907, “the ability to obliterate free labor afforded by coerced workers was seminal to [TCI’s] success...

...For most rural blacks, the only shelter from the arm of the law was subordination to a white patron who could “protect” them from criminal prosecution and sale to the highest bidder...

...As he suggests, though worlds apart in terms of their political economy, these two regions relied symbiotically on the pipeline of forced labor that emanated from rural county courthouses in places like Shelby and Tallapoosa counties...

...As Blackmon notes, though it was bought out by U.S...

...Quite a few books have appeared over the past few years arguing that post–Civil War southern racism, including that found in was penal system, were not all that different from what emerged north of the Mason-Dixon Line...

...embodied “the smothering layers of legal and economic jeopardy” of black life in the Jim Crow South...

...Blackmon narrates this tale with undeniable power and pathos...

...Black men caught up in regular dragnets, and “prosecuted” for gambling, disorderly conduct, carrying a concealed weapon, vagrancy, and a host of other “crimes” open to wide latitude of interpretation by local constables and judges, found themselves at the mercy of the fee system...

...history textbook at random, as I did, and you will find something like this sentence: “Most of these `convict lease workers’ were black men who had been arrested on minor charges and then bound out when they could not pay their fines or court costs...

...The carnage in Alabama’s convict coal mines, as prisoners succumbed to punishment, disease, injuries, violence, explosions, or became lost in the labyrinthine depths, almost defies description...