Slavery by Another Name: Author Douglas Blackmon on the Re-Enslavement of Black People in America

A new book by award-winning journalist Douglas Blackmon uncovers the forgotten history of neo-slavery imposed on hundreds and thousands of African Americans that continued well after the Civil War and persisted right up to the 1940s. Using extensive archival sources, Blackmon uncovers the shameful system created to re-enslave African Americans. Under new laws, they were intimidated, arrested, charged with exorbitant fines, and then sold as forced laborers to corporations, mines and plantations or compelled into involuntary servitude.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We now turn back in time to one of the ugliest chapters in American history: slavery. Most people think that this shameful chapter was closed with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and with even more finality in 1865 with the passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that banned slavery.

But a new book by Douglas Blackmon uncovers the forgotten history of neo-slavery imposed on hundreds and thousands of African Americans that continued well after the Civil War and persisted right up to the 1940s. Using extensive archival sources, Blackmon uncovers the shameful system created to re-enslave African Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: Under new laws, they were intimidated, arrested, charged with exorbitant fines, then sold as forced laborers to corporations, mines and plantations or compelled into involuntary servitude.

The book is called Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. Author Douglas Blackmon is an award-winning journalist, also the bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal in Atlanta. He joins us now from Atlanta.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: Why Slavery by Another Name? Why that title?

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Because this was slavery, even though we didn’t call it that. The legal institution of slavery, the legal concept of slavery that had existed before 1865, had in fact been abolished, and there weren’t laws on the books anymore that authorized slavery, and you couldn’t file a deed on a slave down at the county courthouse anymore. But the reality was that in the years after the Civil War, all of the Southern states passed this array of new laws, which were specifically designed to intimidate African Americans out of the political process, to inhibit their ability to have economic success, and eventually to force first thousands, and then eventually hundreds of thousands, of African Americans back into a form of involuntary servitude. And it wasn’t called slavery, but it was slavery by another name.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you’ve gone back into county records in areas across the South to unearth this story. Tell us about how the mechanisms actually worked, especially places like Alabama and Georgia, how they—and also, where were these victims enslaved into? What were the areas that they worked in?

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, a lot of conventional history that’s been written about this period of time acknowledged that there was this abusive system of county sheriffs and county judges and the state courts leasing prisoners, people who had been convicted of crimes, leasing them out to—as a way of paying off their fines, leasing them to commercial interests like coal mines and iron ore mines, timber camps, turpentine stills, where turpentine was made from pine trees, which was an incredibly important commodity for the whole entire US economy at that time. And that story has been somewhat documented.

But what I did was I went across Alabama and Georgia and Florida and really all of the Southern states, but I went courthouse by courthouse across key areas of the Deep South and discovered enormous numbers of records which really hadn’t been looked at in a hundred years and which made it very clear that among these thousands of people who were arrested and forced into this form of forced labor, that huge numbers of them had committed no crimes at all, or they had been arrested and convicted on the most frivolous charges, like vagrancy or the inability to prove that they had a job at any time, which was something that almost no one could do in an era without pay stubs.

It was against the law in the South for a farm worker to change jobs, to move from one landowner to another landowner without the permission of the first landowner. Now, that law didn’t say it would only be applied to African Americans, but overwhelmingly it only was enforced against African Americans, with the specific purpose of making it impossible for huge numbers of black people to have any kind of economic mobility or to break free from this life of de facto slavery. And that was happening in a pervasive way in every Southern state by the beginning of the twentieth century.

JUAN GONZALEZ: You talk in particular about a brick factory in Atlanta, where you are based, and say that the modern city of Atlanta depended basically on this new enslaved labor to lay out its physical structure.

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: At the end of the nineteenth century, there was this enormous brick-making concern on the outskirts of Atlanta. And, in fact, the company still operates today in a somewhat different form. It was owned by one of the most prominent men in the city. He had been the mayor of Atlanta in the 1880s. His name was James English. He was a famous Confederate war veteran. He was politically the most powerful man in the city. And by the beginning of the twentieth century, he probably was the wealthiest man in the Southern United States and one of the wealthiest men in America.

He had many business concerns, but at the base of his wealth and the base of his enterprises was this brick-making factory, which was worked entirely with these forced laborers who had been acquired from jails and also simply purchased from men who had kidnapped black men from the roadways of the South, which became an incredibly common phenomenon as this new market for black labor developed. And the Chattahoochee brickyard, as it was called, was a place that generated millions and millions of bricks.

The workers there lived lives under excruciatingly terrible circumstances. They were starved, they were whipped, they were beaten. They didn’t receive medical care. Huge numbers of them died. Absolutely horrifying conditions that—but which were common to these forced labor camps that existed all over the South.

But those bricks, millions of them were purchased by the city of Atlanta to pave the streets and the sidewalks of the city. They’re in the foundations of almost every building in Atlanta that predates 1910, like the house that I live in and the sidewalks that I walk on in my neighborhood in downtown Atlanta.