Thanks again for the tremendous reception for the book
I’ve heard from dozens of readers in response to the broadcasts on C-Span of one my presentations about Slavery by Another Name. It’s tremendous that so many people are ready and even anxious for a more candid discussion about these terrible events in U.S. history in the early 20th century.
As I’ve traveled, discussing the book and meeting readers, a stream of African-Americans have related to me how the book made them reassess their own family histories–and the stories of ancestors or acquaintances. Like Phillip Johnson, and so many others on the blog, an African-American woman who talked to me after a speech in Atlanta today, a letter from Virginia that just arrived–so many people tell me they were uncertain about, or never believed, accounts passed down by forebears which seemed to suggest that families were still being held as neo-slaves in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Then they read the book and realize that in fact the old stories are very likely to be true–that thousands of people were living in a state of involuntary servitude well into the lives of millions of Americans who are still alive today.
The discussions I’ve been had over the weeks since the book appeared have been powerful and moving. And with all due respect, they have forcefully contradicted the assertions of a few readers and posters on this blog that it is a mistake to bring forth these terrible aspects of our past.
The reality is that again and again I have experienced marvelously honest conversations in which African-Americans often appeared slightly astonished that whites in the room were able to discuss this past without defensiveness or anger, and in which whites found it remarkable that their black counterparts weren’t hammering them with historic crimes, but expressing thanks that it was finally being honestly discussed.
All of these things convince me that America has arrived at a remarkable moment, when a frank and full accounting of the past is possible for the first time, without the reciminations and denial that have characterized so much of our national discourse on race in the past. It has been thrilling to see that conversation unfold in so many venues over the past two months. Thank you all for being part of it.
(By the way, I’ll soon be updating the calendar of events for the rest of the summer. I’ll be in Washington D.C. at some point in July, back again on Oct. 5; National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta in late July; in New York during September; Universty of Virginia in late October; and several more. Details coming soon.)
DB
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I watched the PBS documentary, “Slavery by Another Name” last night and found it incredibly insightful, as well as sad. Thank you for bringing the stories and this shameful history of our Country to light. I grew up in Alaska and moved to Mississippi as a teenager in the 70′s, and I have never really understood the hatred and distrust of both African Americans and whites that still exists here in the South. Like most, I believed the history books, and had no idea what actually happened after the end of the civil war. The documentary was a true eye opener.
I just saw the PBS broadcast of “Slavery by Another Name.” Some extraordinary new ground broken here. I’m not too surprised about the extent of the exploitation or the lynchings, but the systematic nature of the exploitation of slave labor by major corporations was a surprise.
Another thing struck me, because I thought I knew the Constitution. I am sure the Thirteenth Amendment is almost always presented in grade school to high school as a great triumph of the Civil War, but somehow its escape clause for the defeated South just is literally invisible if you don’t stop and really look at it. Now in light of this book, it will be seen. Any law is apt to be a bit obscure until that which was made in a political process gets turned into reality in practice. But someone put in the clause, didn’t they? And someone taught generations of kids that this was a Northern victory. Would that be the same system that benefitted from slavery in the first place – including the cotton mills of the North? What are the deeper motives? I’m still curious as to why New England encouraged abolitionists while at the same time profiting from those mills. Could it be that it was just trying to keep up with England in its outlawing of slavery? Could it be that the US just wanted to present itself as civilized, so that slave auctions and such would not be so public anymore?
Another interesting thing came about at the end of the show. People who were descendants of men taken into peonage described the pain of their circumstances in this unfree South even a generation after the election of FDR pretty much changed the picture. Then you find out at the very end that not only are they highly articulate witnesses, but also people of accomplishment and high status in today’s America.
It’s a two-edged sword however: sure, there is escape from those earlier circumstances, but always the feeling that not only should it never have happened but that some did not have the good fortune to rise out of the bad circumstances yet. And as many high profile arrests have shown (for instance, that of Professor Henry Louis Gates at his own front door in Cambridge, Mass.) the general prejudices of the society do not go away so fast.
We also cannot discount sheer racial prejudice for some critiques of our current President. On the other hand, there are some policies of our country which he has not changed, which deny due process of law. Few US Presidents have ever been able to exercise the kind of power FDR was able to use at a critical point (and since it was caused partly by war, it is ironic that this war allowed the same administration to deprive Japanese-Americans of their civil rights on the basis of fear and prejudice).
The only conclusion I can come to is that our country is a work in progress and that humans are prone to serious mistakes and sometimes wanton cruelty.
Thank you for bringing this national shame to PBS, the impact of this american Holocaust still echos through our society today in so many ways we have yet to make this country whole. Such a shocking revelation.
While growing up in the 1970′s, my cousin who was a WWII veteran , use to tell me about his experiences growing up in Yazoo City, Mississippi. I never will forget those stories. One of the stories he told was about when he was a kid, folks would find black men dead on the train tracks. He said he was youngster and he thought they were just to dumb or drunk to get across the tracks before the train came. Then one day, he said he realized these black me were killed somewhere else and then laid on the tracks. How horrible!! Growing up when I did and in Ohio, I never knew the kind of fear of whites that he had. But, we tend to want to think that when slavery ended in 1865, black folks just became free with all the rights and privliedges we know and we forget and, painfully, do not want to think about what our parents and their parents lives were like up until say 1965.
I have your book and have referred to it in my own research. Slavery seems to crop up continually through time. Right now, we have trafficking in humans, involving some 27 million slaves, chattel slavery is various less developed nations, and of course “New Age Slavery,” our 2.3 million prisoners in the USA right now. Slavery is more than one institution, but another name for extreme human domination by other humans. If we live in a law-abiding society with designated rights, it is supposed to be non-existent; but the ideal and reality often diverge, as your book shows clearly.
As a Birmingham attorney, I have heard an old, old tale told of a judge who let convicted defendants roll the dice for their sentence in number of months (i.e. 2 to 12 months). I believe these arrests & convictions were from the gambling events set up by law enforcement at the time to create convict laborers. The arbitrariness of the sentencing was rationalized because the defendants were convicted of participating in illegal dice games, though we know from probability that the sentences averaged 7 months. This is one of the handed-down stories in our Bar Association.