Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II » (Reprint)

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.

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.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

…relentless and fascinating. It exposes what has been a mostly unexplored aspect of American history (though there have been dissertations and a few books from academic presses). It creates a broad racial, economic, cultural and political backdrop for events that have haunted Mr. Blackmon and will now haunt us all. And it need not exaggerate the hellish details of intense racial strife. The torment that Mr. Blackmon catalogs is, if anything, understated here. But it loudly and stunningly speaks for itself.

A Note on Language xi

Introduction: The Bricks We Stand On 1

Part 1 The Slow Poison

I The Wedding: Fruits of Freedom 13

II An Industrial Slavery: "Niggers is cheap." 39

III Slavery's Increase: "Day after day we looked Death in the face & was afraid to speak." 58

IV Green Cottenham's World: "The negro dies faster." 84

Part 2 Harvest of an Unfinished War

V The Slave Farm Of John Pace: "I don't owe you anything." 117

VI Slavery Is Not A Crime: "We shall have to kill a thousand... to get them back to their places." 155

VII The Indictments: "I was whipped nearly every day." 181

VIII A Summer Of Trials, 1903: "The master treated the slave unmercifully." 217

IX A Rived Of Anger: The South Is "an armed camp." 233

X The Disapprobation Of God: "It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes." 246

XI Slvery Affirmed: "Cheap cotton depends on cheap niggers." 270

XII New South Rising: "This great corporation." 278

Part 3 The Final Chapter Of American Slavery

XIII The Arrest Of Green Cottenham: A War of Atrocities 299

XIV Anatomy Of A Slave Mine: "Degraded to a plane lower than the brutes." 310

XV Everywhere Was Death: "Negro Quietly Swung Up by an Armed Mob ... All is quiet." 324

XVI Atlanta, The South's Finest City: "I will murder you if you don't do that work." 338

XVII Freedom: "In the United States one cannot sell himself." 371

Epilogue: The Ephemera of Catastrophe 383

Acknowledgments 404

Notes 407

Selected Bibliography 444

Index 460