“Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors and justices of the peace who were often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. The victims were typically guilty of indigence and given a cruel sham of due process. Blackmon found a vast record of original documents describing the arrest, sale and delivery of tens of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms and factories. This book of more than 400 pages reflects impressive research. Steel were examined through the same lens of historical responsibility as the one being trained on German corporations who relied upon slave labor during WWII? More about that later. Guarded by bosses who used whips, “they were slaves in all but name.” Blackmon, who works for the Wall Street Journal, wanted to know what might be revealed if American corporations such as U.S. The county criminal justice system in eight southern states funded itself by arresting black men for vagrancy and other misdemeanors that were applied only to African-Americans, assessing them a fine they couldn’t pay, and then selling their labor to companies that paid the fine and put the defendants to work in coal mines, quarries and other places where conditions were harsh, disease rampant and the death rate high. Instead of freedom, they faced even worse animosity in the South and were the target of racially-charged legislation that kept them marginalized until World War II. Slavery by Another Name reveals the grim reality that – contrary to popular belief about the abolition of slavery – African Americans were still subject to forced labor without compensation after The Civil War, despite having passed the 13th Amendment.

Slavery by another name book