Slavery by Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon

This is a terrifying book, for it lays bare the effective re-enslavement of African Americans after the Emancipation Proclamation ostensibly set them free. Blackmon throws light on the way that unscrupulous lawmen and businessmen in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee seized black men and women---mostly men, incarcerated them on trumpted-up charges---typically, vagrancy--- and sold them as convict laborers to southern industrial concerns. Once purchased, these African-American men endured horrific conditions in the mines of the south; they were beaten, starved, and worked to death.



All the while, the occasional crusaders for justice--Wareen S. Reese, for one----saw their efforts at redress met by a stone wall of southern injustice. Vested southern interests had little practical reason to extend the hand of equity toward helpless southern blacks. It was only in the mid-twentieth century, when improved technology rendered labor-intensive methods of production of coal and steel obsolete and the federal government feared exposure as hypocrites by the Nazi enemy, that the U.S. government enacted and enforced laws against enslavement.

Anyone who thinks that the Jim Crow period--Blackmon prefers the term Neoslavery---was a period of harsh treatment of essentially free people will find themselves summarily disabused of that notion up reading this book. The chapter "Anatomy of a Slave Mine"--whose title is a euphemism--speaks volumes.

German companies have compensated the victims of Nazi atrocities. Should U.S. Steel do the same?

Read
Slavery by Another Name and wince. And learn.