Slavery By Another Name: Blacks Were Jailed as Forced Labor into 1940s

Legal History

Slavery By Another Name: Blacks Were Jailed as Forced Labor into 1940s

Posted Jul 23, 2008, 12:39 pm CDT
By Martha Neil

Slavery officially ended in 1865. But it effectively continued until after World War II in some southern states, in which African-American men were routinely tried and convicted on petty charges and sentenced to work off the fines others paid on their behalf, according to a new book.

Written by Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, Slavery By Another Name documents this systemic abuse:

"Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests," the publisher, Random House, Inc., reports on its website. "With no means to pay these ostensible 'debts,' prisoners were sold as forced laborers to coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries, and farm plantations."

Although columnist Leonard Pitts thought he was reasonably well-versed in black history, much of what the book describes came as news to him, he writes in a Miami Herald column today.

"And is it too fanciful to draw a straight line from that perversion of the justice system to six black kids charged with attempted murder in Jena, La., for jumping on a white boy; or to dozens of black men and women lied into jail by a fake cop in Tulia, Texas; or to Marcus Dixon sentenced to 15 years for having sex with a white girl near Atlanta; or to studies documenting beyond refutation or debate the systemic racism of the nation's cops and courts?"

Additional coverage:

New York Times: "What Emancipation Didn’t Stop After All"

Comments

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Posted by eleyarms - 1 month, 1 week, 5 days, 23 hours, 26 minutes ago

Yeh, keep rehashing the past, that’ll fix everything. The Dems need victims, whether old or new, in order to have a platform upon which to make empty promises of reform.
Posted by Policy Wonk - 1 month, 1 week, 5 days, 21 hours, 29 minutes ago

It’s called learn from the past. And we still have forced labor. It’s called Federal Prison Industries.
Posted by kay sieveding - 1 month, 1 week, 5 days, 18 hours, 25 minutes ago

I think people make money off prisoners but I don’t think it is off prison labor any more. But the description reminds me of what is supposedly happening in China with prison organ transplants and I worry about forced prostitution for debt. I did meet a woman who had been busted and was ordered to pay $10,000 for her jail costs while she was working for a low wage. She told me she paid the fine by dealing.

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