Last night, on Bill Moyers Journal, one of the topics was an amazing new book, Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. It's about the way in which virtual slavery was reimposed on the Southern black population, and lasted well into the lifetime of people still alive today.
This involved much, much more than legal segregation under Plessy, as Moyers describes, and Blackmon explains below. This is incredibly important not only in its own right, but because of the light it throws onto the strikingly similar way that drug laws and other punitive measures have been used in the last several decades to largely crush the promise of the Civil Rights movement for millions of poverty-struck black Americans, people who are, themselves, the descendents of generations who had their freedom stolen from them a second time after supposedly being freed by the Civil war.
Moyers begins:
BILL MOYERS: At one time there were thousands of slaves in our county. And after Richmond fell to Union troops, my home town became, briefly, the military headquarters of the Confederacy. But in twelve years of public schools I cannot remember one of the teachers I deeply cherished describe slavery for what it was. Nor did they, or anyone I knew, talk about how our town's dark and tortured past in restoring white supremacy after the Civil War, prevented the emancipated slaves from realizing the freedom they had been promised. Across the South, from Texas and Louisiana to the Carolinas, thousands of freed black Americans simply were arrested, often on trumped up charges, and coerced into forced labor. And that persisted right up into the 1940s, when I was still a boy.
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This is truly the most remarkable piece of reporting I have read in a long time. I honestly cannot recommend it highly enough. What you report is that no sooner did the slave owners, businessmen of the South, lose the Civil War, then they turned around, and in complicity with state and local governments and industry, reinvented slavery by another name. And what was the result?
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