Slavery By Another Name

I mentioned Douglas Blackmon's excellent book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II once before and I'm glad to learn that Bill Moyers featured it on his show recently. Here's a bit of the transcript:

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Vagrancy. So, vagrancy was a law that essentially, it simply, you were breaking the law if you couldn't prove at any given moment that you were employed. Well, in a world in which there were no pay stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The only way you could prove employment was if some man who owned land would vouch for you and say, he works for me. And of course, none of these laws said it only applies to black people. But overwhelmingly, they were only enforced against black people. And many times, thousands of times I believe, you had young black men who attempted to do that. They ended up being arrested and returned to the original farmer where they worked in chains, not even a free worker, but as a slave.

BILL MOYERS: And the result, as you write, thousands of black men were arrested, charged with whatever, jailed, and then sold to plantations, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories in the deep South. And this went on, you say, right up to World War II?

DOUGLAS BLACKMON: And it was everywhere in the South. These forced labor camps were all over the place. The records that still survive, buried in courthouses all over the South, make it abundantly clear that thousands and thousands of African-Americans were arrested on completely specious claims, made up stuff, and then, purely because of this economic need and the ability of sheriffs and constables and others to make money off arresting them, and that providing them to these commercial enterprises, and being paid for that.

It's a fascinating book, and does a lot to put contemporary issues in an important but essentially forgotten context. See more here.

Comments

This is one of the sub-themes of the novel "A Confederacy of Dunces" by John Kennedy Toole.

Posted by ndm | June 22, 2008 1:44 PM

But just think how much we could lower the stronomically high crime rate of idle, angry black male youths by arresting them for idling with no effort to get a job and menacing their neighbors and other Americans.

Gangsta work gangs to clean up housing projects garbage and piss-soaked stairs and elevators. Painting roads and shovelling snow. Doing housework for single black mommas to tired with all the chilluns and no man to clean the place or watch the yunguns so she could go to job interviews.
Gangsta work gangs that when the hard work dried up, could study for finishing HS...and realize that getting a job might be easier work than sitting around doing nothing and getting shot at and shooting at others....

The guys that did Freakonomics did another nice piece that showed that young black criminals, over 5 years, including their imprisonment time - made on average less than the minimum wage the dumbest, laziest person is capable of getting in the USA today.

Posted by chris ford | June 22, 2008 1:45 PM

Hmm, I'd argue that the system Blackmon describes is closer to serfdom than chattel slavery, but it's something of a continuum of forced labor anyway.

Posted by stm177 | June 22, 2008 2:07 PM

Chris, everyone who reads this blog already knows you're a racist asshole; we're in no danger of forgetting. I suppose an occasional reminder wouldn't hurt, but once a month or so would be more than sufficient.

Posted by djw | June 22, 2008 2:20 PM

"But just think how much we could lower the stronomically high crime rate of idle, angry black male youths by arresting them for idling with no effort to get a job and menacing their neighbors and other Americans."

To expand on these remarks, let me say that I'm in favor not only of arresting jobless black men without due process on account of their skin color, but of the planned extermination of surplus populations everywhere. To take a page from the cultured heirs of Goethe, Bach and Hegel, we should forcibly round up economically uncompetitive people--who as is well known, use such expressions as "chillun's" and "youngun's"--work them to death in coal mines and gas and incinerate their children. Only then will the moral blight of black personhood be cleared from the American landscape.

Posted by chris ford | June 22, 2008 2:42 PM

How about we start with people who make pests of themselves on other people's blogs?

Posted by Omri | June 22, 2008 2:50 PM

By using this service you agree not to post material that is obscene, harassing, defamatory, or otherwise objectionable.

ahem.

Posted by southpaw | June 22, 2008 2:53 PM

Vagrancy laws actually originated in the Middle Ages in the aftermath of the Balck Death--they were designed to keep people from changing jobs or seeking higher wages during the post-plague labor shortage. They were certainly used against blacks, however.

http://wings.buffalo.edu/law/bclc/web/papachristou.htm

Posted by rea | June 22, 2008 2:58 PM

OK, since apparently being a neo-nazi advocating genocide isn't enough - what exactly does one have to do to get banned on this blog?

Posted by novakant | June 22, 2008 3:05 PM

It's Sunday. Moderating Intern will sweep out the garbage on Monday. I hope.

Posted by Omri | June 22, 2008 3:17 PM

C'mon, whomever is impersonating chris ford is trying way too hard. Trollery at its worst.

Posted by um no | June 22, 2008 3:39 PM

Do not censor Chris but listen to him, feel him and hear the psychic currents for whether the man is ironic or straight I say he rather lyrically if not forcefully and fluently channels the core depravity of American racism--North and South. Do not be so censoriously literal minded and instead go back and read Norman Mailer and how often he articulated the soul of white Know Nothings and America's fascist racist ruling classes. After slavery and after what Blackmon tells us (all the academics in America missed this one?!! useless tenured cretinous cowards) we actually have no language (recall George Steiner's Language and Silence) for what we are as a people and what we have done. Just finished Legacy of Ashes and its record of the millions we killed in name of national security and now this book will read next as just ordered only to see if I can find a bottom to our moral abyss. Chris is a help to me as I try to find the terms for my increasingly unbridled misanthropy.

Posted by Goering's Ghost | June 22, 2008 3:49 PM

In Belgium you can still be arrested for having less than $10 in your wallet.

Posted by harold | June 22, 2008 3:51 PM

Sure, these kinds of things used to happen. By the author's own admission, this was all years ago, before WWII! Racism is long since dead in America -- after all, a black man is running for President now!

Beside, Robert Byrd is a Democrat.

Posted by Fake Al | June 22, 2008 4:09 PM

Sure, these kinds of things used to happen. By the author's own admission, this was all years ago, before WWII! Racism is long since dead in America -- after all, a black man is running for President now!

Beside, Robert Byrd is a Democrat.

Posted by Fake Al | June 22, 2008 4:11 PM

@ Goering's Ghost, re:

"After slavery and after what Blackmon tells us (all the academics in America missed this one?!! useless tenured cretinous cowards)"

Just because you haven't read the extensive academic literature on this period of history hardly means it does not exist. Stephen Hahn's A NATION UNDER OUR FEET is a sterling account of post-liberation political life in the black south from 1865 up through the Great Migration to northern cities. There's tons more -- Annelise Orleck's STORMING CAESAR'S PALACE, for instance, is a great work of history about black migrant women from the Deep South in Las Vegas during the Sixties and Seventies, and their efforts to organize to try to achieve some basic level of decency for their community.

Also, I am suspicious if that is the true Chris Ford above -- it's a little too over the top; or maybe he really just is working less hard at hiding his inner Heinrich Himmler. Hard to say with that one.

Posted by Ben Cronin | June 22, 2008 5:01 PM

Sure, these kinds of things used to happen. By the author's own admission, this was all years ago, before WWII! Racism is long since dead in America -- after all, a black man is running for President now!

Besides, Robert Byrd is a Democrat.

Posted by Fake Al | June 22, 2008 5:19 PM

In Belgium you can still be arrested for having less than $10 in your wallet.

Which is really odd, when you think about it--why should Belgians be required to carry around US currency?

Posted by rea | June 22, 2008 7:13 PM

Herr Cronin!

Thanks for the references. Honestly appreciate them and will use them. Wish were younger and had world enough and time would give much to tour extensivley the South and see if as John Updike once said while in Eastern Europe he sensed the pogroms everywhere. Is there a subliminal ubiquitous sense in the air of all the lynchings, beatings, murders in the South? What Southerner writes best about this atmosphere? As if every sound from the past is still out there and could be recaptured but for now must be done in the imagination. Then again add all race crimes in the North would overload the system.

How for so long have Southern whites gone to church on Sunday morning and then lynched in the afternoon?

Posted by Gored Ghost | June 22, 2008 7:38 PM

"Moderating Intern will sweep out the garbage on Monday."

This isn't TPM, where you get banned for upsetting Josh Marshall's personal hot buttons.

There are no interns.

Hell, The Atlantic doesn't even have an IT staff. Matt must have configured the Web server himself, it's so fucked up.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | June 22, 2008 8:44 PM

Gored Ghost, I think Faulkner really captures that sense of the oppressive weight of a violent past very well. "A Light in August" in particular.

Posted by Ben Cronin | June 22, 2008 9:10 PM

The first comment is the real "chris ford". The second one is someone obviously trying to impersonate him. Looks like a bunch of people fell for it - he's never been any sort of eugenics supporter in his comments.

Posted by Billare | June 22, 2008 9:11 PM

Yeah, he's a real prince.

Posted by Freddie | June 22, 2008 9:35 PM

There's nothing in the second "ford" comment concerning eugenics. It simply adopts ford's premise that the black unemployed should be rounded up and goes a short step forward. From chris ford A to chris ford B there isn't much ground to cover.

Posted by Mk | June 22, 2008 10:38 PM

I've heard stories from Southern relatives of the same thing happening to orphans and children of debtors from all races up until around the FDR period.

Posted by Angry Sam | June 22, 2008 10:49 PM

See this book (one of the authors was one of my graduate advisors). The basic idea is that the reason Southern politicians resisted federal programs like Social Security or workplace safety laws or whatever is that it would mean that black people would no longer need to find, and be subservient to, a white patron to get by.

http://www.amazon.com/Southern-Paternalism-American-Welfare-State/dp/0521622107/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214248070&sr=8-14

Posted by David J. Balan | June 23, 2008 3:14 PM