Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

“Surely that was freedom.”

Here, Blackmon imagines how Henry Cottinham might have felt about his marriage to Mary and their newfound ability to raise children independent of white authorities. Thought this seems like the ideal Black life after the Civil War, by ending the chapter with this quote, Blackmon subtly hints that this will not last.

“[I]n 1865 there was no strategy for cleansing the South of the economic and intellectual addiction to slavery.”

Blackmon breaks down why slavery continued in the South after the Civil War despite the emancipation of the slaves. White Southerners gained tremendous economic benefits by engaging in slavery, and many believed Black people were intellectually inferior and therefore should be enslaved.

“The attitudes among Southern whites that a resubjugation of African Americans was an acceptable—even essential—element of solving the ‘Negro question’ couldn’t have been more explicit.”

The South grappled with how to handle Black Americans legally being entitled to equal rights, which most White Southerners found ludicrous. They feared that African Americans would become educated, be elected to higher office, get good jobs, and eventually dominate white people. Their solution was to put Black Southerners back into their rightful position: slaves.

“But the succeeding years would come as if the masses of poverty-stricken whites and Black Americans were twin siblings of a parent indulgent to one and venomous to the other […] that the parent had once sacrificed enormously to rescue the less favored child only made its abandonment deeply more bitter.”

Blackmon uses a sharp metaphor to describe poor Black and white Southerners. In this quote, the “parent” represents the North, which favored white Southerners despite seemingly going to war to protect the Black Southerners. The North’s effective abandonment of Black Americans in the years after the Civil War led to much pain and trauma.

“‘I spent the prime of my life […] as a slave,’ exclaimed one prisoner, while another lamented that he was ‘buried alive […] dead to the world.’”

In a rare written accounts from a Black slave’s perspective, a Texas convict hauntingly described how he spent his life in chains. Another convict chillingly echoed that they were dead in the eyes of the world because they spent many years isolated from society, forced to squander their best working years in slavery.

“[I]n all relations of life and death, we are met by the color line. It hunts us at midnight […] denies us accommodation […] excludes our children from schools […] compels us to pursue only such labor as will bring us the least reward.”

This is a quote from Frederick Douglass. By referring to the “color line,” Douglass referred to an invisible—but heavily enforced—barrier that kept African Americans from receiving the same rights as white Americans. This barrier was upheld by white men, who only allowed flexibility if they could profit from it.

“So long as whites performed at least the bare rituals of due process and cloaked their actions behind claims of equality, the crudest abuses of Black Americans and violations of their protections under law would rarely ever be challenged.”

The US Supreme Court ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson upheld “separate-but-equal” facilities for Black Americans and white Americans. White Southerners were emboldened by this decision and used it to their advantage, highlighting The Toxic Mix of White Mythology and Naïve Racism.

“He told me to count, and I counted up to 15, and could not count any further. He whipped me about 25 licks.”

Hill, a Black enslaved laborer working on John Pace’s farm, described the cruel punishment he received after trying to escape from the farm. This quote illustrates the everyday brutality that slaves faced in the mines and on the farms.

“The message was clear, and shared almost universally among whites: whatever happens to Black men is strictly the result of their own choices. Those choices ultimately were to submit quietly to the emerging new order or be crushed by it.”

This quote refers to a belief expressed in many Southern newspaper editorials and speeches by white Southerners: if Black people were docile and submissive to white men, they would lead content lives within this new system of slavery. If they tried to challenge the white status quo, they would be crushed, and it would be their own fault.

“‘Do you think it’s right?’ Purifoy finally asked. ‘Well, everybody else was doing it,’ Dunbar replied.”

Purifoy, a white man, is stunned to find that his friend, Dunbar, is involved in selling convict labor. Dunbar’s reply speaks to what is oftentimes a universal—but deeply flawed—human sentiment: If everyone is doing the same thing, how can it be wrong? For many Southerners, slavery was so widespread that the ethics of the matter was never questioned.

“Let us not follow the evil example set by those Pharisees who preach what they do not practice and who condemn in others the deeds which they practice among themselves.”

The Advertiser, a Southern newspaper, published an editorial the hypocrisy of Northerners who criticized the South for failing to guarantee equal rights for Black Southerners while tolerating lynching of Black people in the North. The editorial implied that Southerners should not follow the North’s guidance because it did not practice what it preached.

“God forbid that the time will ever come in this country when you are helpless and distressed and have been the victim of oppression when you will be denied that protection of the law to which you appeal and to which every law-abiding human being is entitled among all civilized people.”

Judge Jones was deeply disappointed by the largely white jury’s failure to convict a man of slavery in Alabama, even when the evidence was clear. He reminded them that the law is meant to help the oppressed, and he criticized the jury’s hypocrisy in depriving someone else of the law’s protection when they themselves could one day need it.

“Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedoms away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty.”

This quote from Black intellectual leader W. E. B. DuBois describes the reality of white animosity. White Southerners were unable to accept that African Americans deserved any rights, like the right to vote. They believed freeing slaves was an injustice and that Black men did not do proper work unless a white man was managing them.

“We had sold ourselves into slavery—and what could we do about it?”

This is a Black man’s description of coercion on the McRee brothers’ farm in Georgia. The McRees forced convicts to sign a contract stating that they agreed to be held against their will and that they could be beaten/abused.

“‘i have a little girl that has been kidnapped from me […] and i can’t get her out,’ Farmer wrote. ‘i want ask you is it law for people to whip (col) people and keep them and not allow them to leave without a pass.’”

Reverend Farmer, a Black pastor from North Carolina, wrote to the Department of Justice, asking for help finding his daughter, who had been kidnapped and taken to a Georgia farm. He highlighted the inhumanity of whipping and how slaves were deprived of their one right as a human being: freedom of mobility.

“Let but this crime continue, we will all be slaves. We will be slaves to our prejudices, slaves in that like slaves we tolerate the violation of constitution and the law which we are sworn to support; slaves because we slavishly fail or refuse to perform a lofty civic duty.”

Judge Speer wrote that if white lawmakers and judges failed to prosecute slavery because of their prejudices against African Americans, then they would become slaves symbolically. Though a crass comparison, Speer was trying to urge white men to master their biases and live up to the civility he believed they were capable of.

“One can only imagine what filled Green’s mind as he walked toward the manway to Slope No. 12 in the darkness that Sunday morning. Farther than he had ever been in his twenty-two years from the two counties—Bibb and Shelby—where his family, first as slaves, then as freedmen, lived for four generations, blinking through the darkness and grit in his eyes, he must have studied the molded letters in the concrete archway above the portal spelling the name of the company that for all intents and purposes owned him then as much as old Elisha Cottingham had owned his father and grandfather. Perhaps he mouthed the words—Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.—and then craned his neck to glimpse behind him the clinking column of slaves, the glow of the city, and, beyond, a last flash of stars and predawn sky.”

Slavery by Another Name lacks firsthand testimony from most of the slaves mentioned because they were largely illiterate and did not have the means to write down what happened to them. Due to these missing Black voices, Blackmon has to fill in the gaps with his imagination, as he does here when he writes about Green Cottenham.

“The system arrived at a cynical optimum of economic harmony, knitting together the interests of capitalists, white farmers, local sheriffs and judges, and advocates of the most cruel white supremacy—all joined and served by an unrelenting pyramid of intimidation.”

Blackmon describes how neo-slavery was upheld by both financial motivations of various players and brutal violence. These factors fed into each other and supported the sublimation of Black people.

“Wilson called the eventual suppression of Black political activity ‘the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the white.’”

President Woodrow Wilson held racist views and supported groups like the Ku Klux Klan. As such, he advocated for the supremacy of the white race by stripping Black people of their voting rights.

“If I was yo’ slave an’ you paid a t’ousan’ dollar fo’ me you’d tek care o’ me when I git de mis’ries but you kin git plenty mo’ niggers cheap if I die.”

This is an excerpt from John Spivak’s novel, which explored the forced labor system and The Intentional Revival of Slavery. Here, an enslaved convict named Limpy complains of abuse and excessive work to the white farmer that owns him. He delivers a blunt message: Had he been enslaved on a plantation in the antebellum era, he would have been treated better by virtue of being seen as a valuable piece of property. But in this new age of slavery, his life is nearly worthless because white owners can always find another Black man if he dies.

“The South deluded itself with the illusion that the Negro was happy in his place; the North deluded itself with the illusion that it had freed the Negro. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slave, a legal entity, but it failed to free the Negro, a person.”

This is a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. describing the various fantasies that white Americans expressed about Black people’s status in American society. Both these viewpoints ultimately harmed African Americans and kept them in chains.

“You can’t go back and change the past. Just don’t let it happen again.”

Cynthia James, a modern-day descendant of Martin Danzy, feels it is unnecessary to dwell on the horrors of the past. Instead, the best thing society can do is prevent such a terrible thing from occurring again. This is an opinion shared by many—but not all—Black Americans.

“Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery’s grip on U.S society—its intimate connections to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to millions of Black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end—can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.”

Blackmon makes a key argument that slavery is very relevant to modern America because it directly impacted the disparate wealth and social status of white and Black Americans. The fact that slavery officially ended fairly recently, just over 150 years ago, should shock the nation into action. The continued resistance to do so highlights the country’s Challenges of Confronting the Past.