The enslavement of black Americans continued 80 years after the emancipation proclamation was issued in 1863. The inhumane practice only came to an end because the Washington establishment feared that the US effort in WWII would have been weakened by Japanese propaganda directed to black Americans. The propaganda effort would have told the black American that he was not really an equal partner in American society; therefore, he should not be fighting on the side of the white establishment.
That is the core contention of Douglas A Blackmon, Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, in his book Slavery by Another Name—the Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II—published by Anchor Books, 2009.
“It was a strange irony that after 74 years of hollow emancipation, the final delivery of African Americans from overt slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal Government in their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors perpetrated by an enemy country against its own despised minorities,” concludes Blackmon.
The author outlines in insightful and sordid detail the reality that the South instituted a system of forced incarceration of black men on the most spurious of charges and then sold them into a form of industrial slavery that was in many ways ten times more savage and life-threatening than antebellum and agricultural and farm slavery of the pre-war emancipation form. The research work destroys the enduring myth of the humanitarian movement and those who still argue that the US as a society was so overcome with grief at the inhumanity of slavery and so was moved to “free the slaves” on the basis of a realisation of shared humanity; that nonsense has been successfully peddled long enough and fooled sufficient numbers of people, including generations of blacks and other non-white peoples made to feel guilty about raising the inherent evil of slavery and discrimination.
Blackmon’s research into the system of peonage that existed in places such as Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, Tennessee and indeed most of the South leads him to demonstrate that the system of industrial slavery was reinstituted after Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation to meet the needs of industrialisation after the civil war ended. The system of peonage of black Americans “developed into a miserable business and custom to catch up ignorant and helpless Negro men and women upon the flimsiest and most baseless charges and carry them before a justice of the peace who is usually a paid hireling of these wealthy dealers,” argued US Attorney Warren S Reese to several justices across the South. On the few occasions when the courts, judges and juries made up of white southern men, agreed that a violation of the rights of individuals had taken place, the sentences were light and suspended, never to be effected.
Moreover, in a landmark ruling by the US Supreme Court on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, it was pointed out that while the 13th and 14th amendments “declared all persons born in the United States to be full-fledged citizens with the right to vote regardless of race or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, it did not clearly state that the holding of slaves was a crime, and the disparate treatment of former slaves was made only a misdemeanor, carrying a maximum penalty of one year in jail.” The re-enslavement therefore was not only upheld by state courts but supported by the federal courts. Indeed, as Blackmon details, by the turn of the 20th century after unavailing efforts by President Theodore Roosevelt to mitigate re-enslavement, “openly white supremacist” Woodrow Wilson proceeded to the White House and “strongly backed the demands of southern leaders that their states be left alone to deal with issues of race and black voting without interference from the North, ensuring there would be no challenge to the raft of laws passed to disenfranchise African Americans across the region.” Wilson introduced racially segregated work spaces, office buildings and restrooms, notes Blackmon as indication that institutionalised and brutal racism was not merely the doing of the racist and greedy industrialists of the South.
As Blackmon details, there was an economic rationale to the slavery. After emancipation, the former slaves hot-footed it out of the plantations, seeking to find work and a new life for themselves and families. In its desperate search for labour to rebuild the southern economy, the southern states developed vagrancy laws, laws prohibiting black men from being without a job and without a home, from even looking on a white woman, for being brave enough to answer a white man, for littering, for lying and for a range of marginal offences designed to trap them and their families in breach. Found guilty after summary trial by a justice of the peace, the men were then imprisoned. With-in days, their fines were paid by farmers and industrialists. The prisoners were then required to work-off the fines paid.
The work and the conditions underground to mine coal, to harvest timber and turpentine from the forest trees, to stoke furnaces and to produce pig iron and a range of the crude metals needed for industrialisation was inhumane beyond belief. As Blackmon records, just as the six-month sentences were about to end, the owners would trump-up some other spurious accusation and unilaterally extend the time that had to be served. Comparatively few of the enslaved prisoners got out alive and in sufficient health to revive their lives. “The convicts of the new system were of value only as long as their sentences or physical strength lasted. If they died while in custody, there was no financial penalty to the company leasing them. Another black labourer would always be available from the state or a sheriff,” states Blackmon. Blackmon’s accounts of life underground reveal the horrific conditions and unbelievable inhumanity:
“Inside the shafts, deadly gases accumulated in unventilated sections, work continued even as water, seeping from the walls and fouled with the miners’ waste and excrement, accumulated in the shafts. Intestinal disorders, malaria, pneumonia and respiratory problems dogged the men. Endless contact with coal dust led to black lung disease, miserable and certain slow death.”
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