The PBS special “Slavery By Another Name” shines light on a critical part of American history that has been for the most part, ignored or forgotten; the persistence of a new form of neo-slavery that lasted for over eighty years beyond the end of the Civil War. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1862) is traditionally regarded as the symbolic end of slavery in the United States. The 13th amendment, passed in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, officially abolished slavery. The Reconstruction Period that followed the Civil War (1865 to 1877) was a noble effort led by the radical wing of the Republican Party to enfranchise and protect the former slave population of the South. In addition to the 13th amendment, the 14th amendment (1868) granted federally protected civil rights for all Americans and the 15th amendment legally enfranchised the former slave population. It decreed that the right to vote could not be denied because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The economic infrastructure of the South was in shambles at the end of the Civil War. By 1860 the slave population in the Southern states numbered 4 million. Slave labor was the foundation of the Southern economy and the end of slavery required a new economic model be put in place in the South. Reconstruction was motivated by several factors. The three most important factors were: (1) Punishing the South for succeeding from the Union. (2) Preventing the restoration of the aristocratic social and political power structure in the South. (3) Protecting and ensuring the rights of the newly freed slave population.
The living conditions, educational and economic opportunities flourished for a brief period during the Reconstruction Era. African Americans were elected to political office at the local, state, and federal level. Reconstruction faced numerous hurdles and obstacles from the beginning. Vice President Andrew Johnson succeeded Lincoln as President after Lincoln’s assassination. Johnson was a southerner from Tennessee. He opened deified and refused to enforce the Reconstruction laws. Conservative Democrats in the South openly and covertly fought Reconstruction in the South. White animosity directed towards the freed black population and the Ku Klux Klan emerged to terrorize the black population. The lack of political will and federal support finally brought the era of Reconstruction to an end in 1877 when President Rutherford B. Hayes removed the last federal troops from the Southern States. The 20th African American intellectual W.E.D. Dubois summarized Reconstruction in the following way: “The slave went free; stood free a brief moment in the sun; then moved again into slavery.” The PBS documentary “Slavery Under Another Name” picks up the story at this point.
The PBS documentary is based on the Douglas A. Blackmon’s book “Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.” Blackmon’s book won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. It is incredibly well researched and documented. Numerous books have been written about the Jim Crow south but Blackmon’s work makes a strong case the Jim Crow law had the effect of keeping the black population enslaved until World War II. The purpose of the laws was to intimidate the black population and to replace the labor force that was lost with the loss of slavery as an institution.
Tens of thousands of black men, and a smaller number of black women, were thrown into forced labor. The incentive was primarily economical but the threat of arbitrary imprisonment and forced labor also served to protect the second-class status of African Americans in the south. In a promotion video for the PBS film Blackmon says: “In the fall when it was time to pick cotton huge numbers of black people were arrested. In the cotton growing counties there were surges of arrests.” In the same promotional video Blackmon says: “If they wanted a man convicted of anything they simply had their own justice of the peace declare a man guilty.” The labor of the black prisoners was leased out or contracted by individual as well as corporations. Birmingham, Alabama quickly became one of the leading industrial centers in the post-war South. Black prisoners were forced to labor in the coalmines that were owned and operated by U.S. Steel. According to Blackmon, the death rate in the coalmines was between 30 to 40 percent. Prisoner labor was also used in the lumberyards, brickyards, and railroads. Blackmon’s book and the PBS documentary tell an unpleasant but important story about American history.
Blackmon’s account of forced slavery in the South is similar to labor camps of Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1930s through the 1950s. Stalin used labor camps as both a means of terrorizing the population and as a resource of slave labor. The Soviet Union’s evolution from an agrarian to an industrialized country was founded on slave labor. The details of Stalin’s labor camps was first documented in detail by Alexander Solzhynitsyn in his three volume study titled The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1978). Solzhynitsyn presented a glimpse into the labor camps with his novella “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). Solyzhynitsyn survived a ten year sentence in Stalin’s labor camps. The same story has been told more recently in “Gulag: A History” by Anne Applebaum. Applebaum’s book won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2003. Applebaum had access to numerous records and documents about the labor camps that Solzhenitsyn didn’t have because her research followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. One interesting fact to keep in perspective is that the Soviet labor camps exists for maybe forty years while the forced enslavement of African Americans lasted for eighty years. African Americans forced into enslaved labor numbered in the thousands. The victims caught up in Stalin’s camps numbered in the millions.
Sources
Anne Applebaum, “Gulag: A History“
Douglas A. Blackmon, “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.”
W.E.D. DuBois, “Black Reconstruction in America“
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Gulag Archipelago“