JUAN GONZALEZ: We now turn back in time to one of the ugliest chapters in American history: slavery. Most
people think that this shameful chapter was
closed with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
in 1863 and with even more finality in 1865
with the passage of the 13th Amendment to
the Constitution that banned slavery.
But a new book by Douglas Blackmon uncovers
the forgotten history of neo-slavery imposed
on hundreds and thousands of African Americans
that continued well after the Civil War and
persisted right up to the 1940s. Using extensive
archival sources, Blackmon uncovers the shameful
system created to re-enslave African Americans.
AMY GOODMAN: Under new laws, they were intimidated,
arrested, charged with exorbitant fines, then
sold as forced laborers to corporations, mines
and plantations or compelled into involuntary
servitude.
The book is called Slavery by Another Name:
The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America
from the Civil War to World War II. Author
Douglas Blackmon is an award-winning journalist,
also the bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal
in Atlanta. He joins us now from Atlanta.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Thanks for having me.
AMY GOODMAN: Why Slavery by Another Name? Why that title?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Because this was slavery, even though
we didn’t call it that. The legal institution
of slavery, the legal concept of slavery that
had existed before 1865, had in fact been
abolished, and there weren’t laws on the
books anymore that authorized slavery, and
you couldn’t file a deed on a slave down
at the county courthouse anymore. But the
reality was that in the years after the Civil
War, all of the Southern states passed this
array of new laws, which were specifically
designed to intimidate African Americans out
of the political process, to inhibit their
ability to have economic success, and eventually
to force first thousands, and then eventually
hundreds of thousands, of African Americans
back into a form of involuntary servitude.
And it wasn’t called slavery, but it was
slavery by another name.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you’ve gone back into county 
records in areas across the South to unearth this
story. Tell us about how the mechanisms actually
worked, especially places like Alabama and
Georgia, how they — and also, where were
these victims enslaved into? What were the
areas that they worked in?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, a lot of conventional history that’s
been written about this period of time acknowledged
that there was this abusive system of county
sheriffs and county judges and the state courts
leasing prisoners, people who had been convicted
of crimes, leasing them out to — as a way
of paying off their fines, leasing them to
commercial interests like coal mines and iron
ore mines, timber camps, turpentine stills,
where turpentine was made from pine trees,
which was an incredibly important commodity
for the whole entire US economy at that time.
And that story has been somewhat documented.
But what I did was I went across Alabama and
Georgia and Florida and really all of the
Southern states, but I went courthouse by
courthouse across key areas of the Deep South
and discovered enormous numbers of records
which really hadn’t been looked at in a
hundred years and which made it very clear
that among these thousands of people who were
arrested and forced into this form of forced
labor, that huge numbers of them had committed
no crimes at all, or they had been arrested
and convicted on the most frivolous charges,
like vagrancy or the inability to prove that
they had a job at any time, which was something
that almost no one could do in an era without
pay stubs.
It was against the law in the South for a
farm worker to change jobs, to move from one
landowner to another landowner without the
permission of the first landowner. Now, that
law didn’t say it would only be applied
to African Americans, but overwhelmingly it
only was enforced against African Americans,
with the specific purpose of making it impossible
for huge numbers of black people to have any
kind of economic mobility or to break free
from this life of de facto slavery. And that
was happening in a pervasive way in every
Southern state by the beginning of the twentieth
century.
JUAN GONZALEZ: You talk in particular about a brick 
factory in Atlanta, where you are based, and say that
the modern city of Atlanta depended basically
on this new enslaved labor to lay out its
physical structure.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: At the end of the nineteenth century,
there was this enormous brick-making concern
on the outskirts of Atlanta. And, in fact,
the company still operates today in a somewhat
different form. It was owned by one of the
most prominent men in the city. He had been
the mayor of Atlanta in the 1880s. His name
was James English. He was a famous Confederate
war veteran. He was politically the most powerful
man in the city. And by the beginning of the
twentieth century, he probably was the wealthiest
man in the Southern United States and one
of the wealthiest men in America.
He had many business concerns, but at the
base of his wealth and the base of his enterprises
was this brick-making factory, which was worked
entirely with these forced laborers who had
been acquired from jails and also simply purchased
from men who had kidnapped black men from
the roadways of the South, which became an
incredibly common phenomenon as this new market
for black labor developed. And the Chattahoochee
brickyard, as it was called, was a place that
generated millions and millions of bricks.
The workers there lived lives under excruciatingly
terrible circumstances. They were starved,
they were whipped, they were beaten. They
didn’t receive medical care. Huge numbers
of them died. Absolutely horrifying conditions
that — but which were common to these forced
labor camps that existed all over the South.
But those bricks, millions of them were purchased
by the city of Atlanta to pave the streets
and the sidewalks of the city. They’re in
the foundations of almost every building in
Atlanta that predates 1910, like the house
that I live in and the sidewalks that I walk
on in my neighborhood in downtown Atlanta.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you name the names of some other corporations.
For example, you write about Morgan Stanley.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Not Morgan Stanley, but I mention JPMorgan
as a company, that in the past I’ve written
about the role of JPMorgan in — I did a
story some years ago about — that sort of
raised the question of, what are the responsibilities
of a bank when it finds itself wittingly or
unwittingly involved in the financing of some
enterprise or the transfer of funds related
to enterprises that in hindsight today look
very, very suspect?
And so — but in terms of the companies that
I write about in the book, there’s Chattahoochee
Brick, Captain English’s enterprise, but
he then, on the basis of that wealth, he then
founded a different bank in Atlanta, which
eventually became the largest financial institution,
the most powerful financial institution, in
the South and eventually was subsumed into
what is today Wachovia Bank.
There was another great entrepreneur of Atlanta,
equally important figure in the creation of
the modern city, who also relied heavily on
this form of labor in coal mines and iron
ore mines. He founded a bank that is today
SunTrust Bank. That bank and his other enterprises
were instrumental in the creation of the modern
Coca-Cola Company. He had other enterprises
that became Georgia Power Company and Southern
Company, which are two of the biggest utilities
in the Southern United States.
In Alabama, US Steel Corporation was the largest
player in operating mines where you had thousands
and thousands of these forced laborers at
work. And there are many other companies today
that, in one manner or another, have some
sort of a connection — whether they know
it or not, they have some connection back
to these terrible events of a hundred years
ago.
AMY GOODMAN: US Steel?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: US Steel Corporation.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And how was it — for instance, if someone
was arrested on a vagrancy charge, you would
assume that this would only be a very short
sentence. How were they able to be then impressed
into service for these companies for longer
periods of time?
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, take, for instance, the example
of a man named Green Cottenham, around whom
I built much of the narrative of the book.
Green Cottenham was a child of former slaves
who was born in the 1880s in the center of
Alabama. And by the time he had reached adulthood,
just after the turn-of-the-century, this whole
new system of intimidation, really terror
in many respects, had come into place against
African Americans across the South.
And he was arrested in the spring of 1908,
when a deputy sheriff in Columbiana, Alabama
went out on a sweep, effectively, to round
up a number of African American men, because
a few days later, the man from the US Steel
mine, who came by periodically to pick up
laborers and take them back to the mines,
would be arriving in a few days. And so, Green
Cottenham was swept up. He was standing around
with a number of other African Americans behind
the train station in the town. And this group
of men were arrested for no particular reason.
By the time they were brought before a judge
two days later, the deputy couldn’t remember
exactly what the charge had been, and so the
original charge that’s written down on the
day he’s arrested is different from the
one that the judge finally decides to convict
him of, which was simply vagrancy. And almost
any farm worker, and certainly any indigent
African American man, in 1908 could be charged
with vagrancy, unless he had some powerful
white man willing to step forward and say,
“No, he works for me. He’s under my control.”
Well, that didn’t happen for Green Cottenham,
and so he is convicted of vagrancy.
He was sentenced to a fine of $10 or thereabouts,
but on top of the fines, there would be imposed
on these men — in those days, sheriffs and
court clerks and many other government officials
received their compensation not in salaries
from the government, but from fees that were
charged to the people they arrested and convicted.
And so, in addition to his fine, there was
almost $200 of additional fees tacked onto
what he would have to pay to become free.
Well, that’s two or three years’ wages
in that era. And that was something that would
be impossible for a young man like him to
have produced.
And so, to pay off those fines, he was effectively
sold into the control of US Steel Corporation,
who would pay back his fines a month at a
time. And this happened to thousands of people,
many of whom, even after their fines had been
paid off, were still not released, or the
people who were holding them would invent
another offense and make another claim of
a spurious crime, have them convicted again
and hold them for an even longer period of
time.
AMY GOODMAN: You say the system’s final demise came
with World War II. Explain why that was so
significant.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Well, at the beginning of World 
War II, just days after Pearl Harbor, as President
Roosevelt was mobilizing the national war
effort, one of the issues that was being discussed
at the Cabinet level in Washington were the
propaganda vulnerabilities of the United States:
what would be the issues that the enemies
of America would raise to try to undercut
morale in the United States? And immediately,
one of President Roosevelt’s aides points
out that particularly the Japanese would argue
that America was not the country fighting
for freedom and that the proof of that was
the treatment of African Americans in the
Deep South. Roosevelt realized what a vulnerability
that was. He ordered that there be legislation
against lynchings, making it a federal crime,
that that be introduced in Congress, which
it was.
And then, shortly after that, the attorney
general was having a similar conversation
with his deputies, one of whom said, “By
the way, there are also many places in the
South where slaves are still being held, and
it’s been the policy of the federal government,
of the Department of Justice, not to investigate.”
And this was the case for many decades, that
the Department of Justice had a policy not
to investigate allegations of slavery in the
South and not to bring prosecutions against
those who were holding slaves. But because
of the propaganda concerns at the beginning
of World War II, the attorney general issued
a new policy, which said, from this day forward,
investigate these cases. And within a few
months, there was an investigation and a prosecution
underway against a family in Texas which had
been holding a man named Alfred Irving as
a slave for many, many years under terrible
circumstances.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve got five seconds.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And they were convicted and imprisoned
the following year. And that’s the technical
end of slavery in America.
AMY GOODMAN: Douglas Blackmon, thanks so much for being
with us. He’s author of the book Slavery
by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black
Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
