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

A core theme that Blackmon explores in his book is how racism and Black oppression following the Civil War were not an inevitable sociological force but a series of individual, conscious decisions. The primary examples used are white judges and law enforcement officers who cooperated with white businessmen to create the forced labor system. Local officers like Francis M. Pruitt chose to arrest Black men on fraudulent charges. Justices of the peace, like Jesse London, agreed to preside over cases alleging false charges. White businessmen chose to buy or lease convicted Black men and abuse them. These decisions added up to further establish white Southerners’ belief that “a resubjugation of African Americans was an acceptable—even essential—element of solving the ‘Negro question’” (53).

The decisions of white Northerners and somewhat progressive Southerners also contributed to neo-slavery based on their desire for economic gain. Northerner investors financed several Southern businesses that utilized forced labor despite the North’s alleged support of Black people’s rights. Judge Jones, an apparent progressive, caved to white anger during the slavery trials and ruled that white men could enter exploitative contracts with convicted Black men if a local judge approved it. Nearly every major player in this book, from President Roosevelt to the Supreme Court to mining companies, made a crucial decision that upheld slavery in some fashion. As Blackmon writes, “in 1865 there was no strategy for cleansing the South of the economic and intellectual addiction to slavery” (41).

Even poor white people were united against Black people despite sharing financial issues with poor Black sharecroppers. As Blackmon notes, “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” (87). The following years would show the wealth gap between poor white and Black Americans widen, especially in the South.

A large part of slavery’s revival in the form of leased convict labor was an attempt to regain the sense of strength and familiarity white Southerners lost after the Civil War. By describing the “lifeless” landscape of the post-war South, Blackmon reflects on the bleakness of the human condition and the devastating effects of the war for White Southerners. He writes, “The big field, long devoid of its hardwood forest, was striped with lifeless rows of cotton stalks and corn husks […] thousands of bedraggled strips of lint still clung to broken cotton bolls.” (30). The same plot of land, however, meant something very different to the newly freed slaves who had cultivated it. This tension between Black and white perspectives is something Blackmon contends with, which he makes clear by contrasting Elisha’s despair with Scipio’s joy, writing, “Whatever bitterness Elisha Cottingham carried on the day of Henry and Mary’s wedding must have been more than surpassed by the joy of the plantation’s oldest former slave, Scipio” (31). This quote underscores the extent to which the joy of emancipation would be short-lived, as Jim Crow Laws and terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan emerged to create a new system of institutionalized racial subjugation.