Unfortunately, there are also still many people who are desperate to contort every fragment of history that they find into a foundation for a particular political agenda.  In the terrain covered by my book and film, this is done often by both Democrats (who want to forget their ardent opposition to civil rights for African Americans a century ago) and more recently by Republican supporters (who want to claim credit for passage of the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s, even though the moderate wing of the party that cooperated with Lyndon Johnson in those votes has since been essentially obliterated).

Earlier today, I rejected a comment from one person because of the sweepingly inaccurate depiction it contained of what was and wasn’t in the film.  He submitted another post a short while later that was marginally different, which I approved mostly so that others can see a good demonstration of what I call “historical contortionism.”  It’s an impulse to twist history in ways that make it propagandistic, and that can see history only through a lens of the present.  It values history only to the degree that bits and pieces can be used as ammunition in some contemporary fight–usually in ways that are irrelevant and ultimately false.

People who are serious about history, serious about the truth, whether they are conservative or liberal, Democrats or Republicans, realize that that sort of history–the kind of thing that used to come from the “Ministry of Information” in other countries–is dangerous.  Slavery by Another Name is about America’s failures. No one group gets the blame. No one group gets to take credit. Don’t listen to anyone who says otherwise. Don’t become an unwitting, or witless, co-conspirator in a new effort to pollute our understanding of the past. 

Here’s the response I gave to the historical contortionist, whose comment is on the blog as well.

So I want to thank everyone who has visited this site, shared their stories and reached out to me in other ways. I have learned so much from all of you.  I’m also gratified that the vast vast majority of the communication I’ve had has come from readers who wanted constructive dialogue with others about the complicated issues of race and the past that are still so much at the center of America’s national discourse.  Even people who wanted to disagree with me have often had good and admirable intentions.  But there have been other voices too, who remind us that there are still many people in our society whose goals are destructive or propagandistic.  They are the strongest argument for continuing to seek honest conversation, driven by facts and clinical observation.

In a few days, on Feb. 13, 2012, the documentary film based on my book will appear on PBS, at 9 p.m. EST.  Hopefully, it will stir an even larger conversation about these important questions in American life–and hopefully it will once again be a discussion marked by constructive goals.  Wherever it goes, I’ll  do a better job of sharing my thoughts on the blog from here on.

Thanks again to all of you who have joined in this dialogue. Please stay with me, and encourage others to join us.

9 p.m. Eastern Time (Check your local listings)

PBS broadcasts the 90-minute documentary Slavery by Another Name, based on Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book.  Directed by Sam Pollard. Produced by Catherine Allan and Douglas Blackmon. Written by Sheila Curran Bernard.  A tpt National Productions project.

You can also see the film online at http://video.pbs.org/video/2176766758

Or order the DVD at http://www.shoppbs.org/home/index.jsp

Watch the trailer.

Visit the Pulitzer Prize website.

Gordon School

45 Maxfield Ave.

East Providence, R.I.

Contact: 401-434-3833

Presented by The Book Lady Bookstore and the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum
2009 Pulitzer Prize winning writer and journalist Douglas Blackmon, author of Slavery By Another Name, will give a free lecture and sign books, lecture to begin at 7 pm.

website: bookladybookstore.com
phone: 912-233-3628

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

By JANET MASLIN
Books of The NEW YORK Times
Published: April 10, 2008

He describes free men and women forced into industrial servitude, bound by chains, faced with subhuman living conditions and subject to physical torture. That plight was horrific. But until 1951, it was not outside the law.

All it took was anything remotely resembling a crime. Bastardy, gambling, changing employers without permission, false pretense, “selling cotton after sunset”: these were all grounds for arrest in rural Alabama by 1890. And as Mr. Blackmon explains in describing incident after incident, an arrest could mean a steep fine. If the accused could not pay this debt, he or she might be imprisoned.

Alabama was among the Southern states that profitably leased convicts to private businesses. As the book illustrates, arrest rates and the labor needs of local businesses could conveniently be made to dovetail.

For the coal, lumber, turpentine, brick, steel and other interests described here, a steady stream of workers amounted to a cheap source of fuel. And the welfare of such workers was not the companies’ concern. So in the case of John Clarke, convicted of “gaming” on April 11, 1903, a 10-day stint in the Sloss-Sheffield mine in Coalburg, Ala., could erase his fine. But it would take an additional 104 days for him to pay fees to the sheriff, county clerk and witnesses who appeared at his trial.

In any case, Mr. Clarke survived for only one month and three days in this captivity. The cause of his death was said to be falling rock. At least another 2,500 men were incarcerated in Alabama labor camps at that time.

This is a very tough story to tell, and not just because of its extremely graphic details. Mr. Blackmon, who was reared in the Mississippi Delta and is now the Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, must set forth a huge chunk of history. He writes of how the emancipation of slaves left Southern plantations “not just financially but intellectually bereft” because the slaves’ knowledge and experience could be indispensable; how the rise of industry reshaped the South; how a new generation of African-Americans who had not known slavery found themselves threatened by it; how slavery intersected with efforts to unionize labor; and even how, once blacks lost their voting rights but still had clout at the Republican convention, they were strategically important to President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 election campaign.

The roles of elected officials in acknowledging and stopping this new slavery are a crucial part of Mr. Blackmon’s story. Needless to say, it is complicated. The book describes the 1903 investigation authorized by the Justice Department, the trial of accused slave traders and the aggressive stance taken by Warren S. Reese Jr., the United States attorney in Alabama, in prosecuting his case.

“As allegations of slavery in his jurisdiction multiplied, Reese demonstrated a prehensile comprehension of the murky legal framework governing black labor,” Mr. Blackmon writes, “and a hard-nosed unwillingness to ignore the implications of the extraordinary evidence that soon poured into his office.”

The resulting trial is among this book’s many zealously researched episodes. (Mr. Blackmon’s sources range from corporate records to one “Sheriff’s Feeding Account, 1899-1907.”) Its outcome was promising, but there were loopholes. As one sign of this story’s complexity, consider that the traders were tried on charges of peonage.

Those charges turned out not to be applicable in Alabama. And in another such case, lawyers would argue that the charge should instead be involuntary servitude. Reformers were dealing with “a constitutional limbo in which slavery as a legal concept was prohibited by the Constitution, but no statute made an act of enslavement explicitly illegal.”

Mr. Blackmon’s way of organizing this material is to bookend his legal and historical chronicle with the personal story of Green Cottenham, a black man born free in the mid-1880s. This gets “Slavery by Another Name” off to a shaky start, if only because many of Mr. Blackmon’s wordings are speculative. The book underscores that if black Americans’ enslavement to U.S. Steel (which, when it acquired the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, became a prime offender) is analogous to the slavery that occurred in Nazi Germany, it also emphasizes that the American slaves’ illiteracy meant there would be no written records of their experience. So imagining Mr. Green’s experience becomes something of a stretch.

But as soon as it gets to more verifiable material, “Slavery by Another Name” becomes relentless and fascinating. It exposes what has been a mostly unexplored aspect of American history (though there have been dissertations and a few books from academic presses). It creates a broad racial, economic, cultural and political backdrop for events that have haunted Mr. Blackmon and will now haunt us all. And it need not exaggerate the hellish details of intense racial strife.

The torment that Mr. Blackmon catalogs is, if anything, understated here. But it loudly and stunningly speaks for itself.

By Teresa Weaver

SOUTHERN HISTORY CONTAINS INFINITE dark corners and deep hiding places. Douglas A. Blackmon, longtime Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, excavates a particularly well-buried chapter of our past in Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Doubleday, $29.95). The end of Reconstruction ushered in an age of “neoslavery,” Blackmon reveals, as some corporations, landowners, and government officials conspired to arrest black people on arbitrary charges and lease them out–essentially selling them–into years of involuntary servitude. Blackmon pulls no punches as he identifies major corporations and illustrious families that prospered from this forced labor until the mid-twentieth century.
“These events explain more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum slavery that preceded,” he writes.
A terrific journalist and gifted writer, Blackmon is fearless in going wherever the research leads him. At times, the onslaught of details is almost dizzying, but that’s a minor quibble with a supremely brave and focused book.
In recent years, German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and Swiss bankers who robbed Holocaust victims of their fortunes have faced tough questions about what they owe the descendants of the people they wronged. In raising those same questions about prominent families in Atlanta, Birmingham, and beyond, Blackmon has probably wrecked any chance of being invited to join a country club. But he’s brought to light another sickening reminder of the insidious nature of prejudice.