Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon

Author:Douglas A. Blackmon [Blackmon, Douglas A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf, azw3
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Politics, Neo-slavery, White Supremacy, African Americans
ISBN: 9781480527744
Publisher: Doubleday Books
Published: 2008-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

Until the day of the arraignments, most of Alabama’s political elite and the white general public had imagined that the slavery investigation was entirely the handiwork of the White House and its representative in Montgomery, U.S. Attorney Reese. Judge Jones’s directions to the grand jury a week earlier were startling, but his confusing equivocation after denouncing involuntary servitude left open the question of where Jones’s true allegiances rested. Across the South, newspapers and politicians still banked on the fact that he would uphold a well-honed ritual of southern posturing in high-profile court cases involving blacks: factitiously expressing the importance of legal rights for African Americans while simultaneously ensuring no harm to a white defendant and aggressively curtailing redress to the black victim.

“It turns out that the main mover in Alabama to break up what is called the peonage system, whereby convicts are held to labor indefinitely by white men, who pay their penal fines and contract their labor in return, is Judge Thomas G. Jones, ex-governor of the state,” wrote the Atlanta Constitution. “If there is anything criminal in the system, that criminality should be exposed and punished properly, and whatever of false hue and cry there is on the affair should be exposed.”58

The Montgomery Advertiser continued to proclaim mock surprise at the discovery of forced labor in Alabama: “The character of offense was peculiar and unknown in this country since the emancipation of the negroes. It was practically and to all intents the enslavement of men for a period of time in violation of State and Federal law. There has been much brutality charged and a great deal of testimony given …few of …the people of Alabama …ever dreamed of such things as seem to have existed.”59

As the first trial neared, however, it was clear that Judge Jones was deviating from the script. He appeared to be serious. The Advertiser, alarmed that a southern leader would join with a Republican president from New York to attack southern whites who resubjugated blacks, poured forth with what had become the ascendant view of turn-of-the-century white southerners. “A sentiment that is now practically unanimous throughout the Southern States … is that we, the white men of the South, propose to settle racial questions in our own way and in our own time. And we will do it in the way best for both races,” the newspaper editorialized.

Several millions of ex-slaves, suddenly exalted to citizenship, was the heritage we received from the Federal government. As if the mere fact of their presence in changed conditions was not serious enough, they were endowed with all the political rights that any citizen of the Union possessed, and for which they were neither prepared nor fitted. And then, to add to the bitterness of our degradation, and the hopelessness of the problem, our country was overrun with adventurers from the North, some of them good and well meaning men, but others as unprincipled scoundrels as ever scuttled a ship or robbed a safe. It was these and their kind who made the condition of the Southern people unbearable and revolt inevitable.

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