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Book Unearths Stories Of
Forced Labor After Civil War

By Leonard E. Colvin
Chief Reporter
New Journal & Guide
 
       History books tell us that slavery ceased at the end of the Civil War.  But in a newly released book, a Wall Street journalist offers evidence that the brutal practice existed long after the War Between The States ended.
       Author  Douglas A. Blackmon’s book, “Slavery By Another Name,” (Random House) describes the practice of  “Neo-Slavery” that existed and was legally sanctioned in several southern states up to the 1940s. “Neo” means “new”, and according to Blackmon’s research for the book, thousands of African American men were arrested or kidnapped in Alabama, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi and Virginia and sold. They were then forced to work at industrial or farm operations.
       Most southern states established anti-African American laws after emancipation. They were  used by local sheriffs and police, and sanctioned by political leaders, to arrest black men, most of the times for vagrancy, if they could not prove they were employed or  had a  permanent home, according to Blackmon’s book.
        The men were then given brief trials and charged. But most of the time  they could not afford the layers of fines imposed by the judge to be paid to the sheriff, the court, the clerks and the witnesses.
       These black men were then sold or “turned over” by the sheriff to company or farm work camps to serve out their sentences.  Many corporations ran coal mines down South, and the men were used to dig up thousands of tons  of coal as free labor. In return the county and the sheriff would be paid upwards to $30 and $40. The company got free labor for as long as they needed the mostly  young and black men.
       “This practice began in earnest around the 1880s. A good portion of the money  used to run the state of Alabama was generated from this practice,” said Blackmon, who is a reporter for the Atlanta Bureau  of the Wall Street Journal.  “Thousands of young black  men were chained and forced to work in the coal mines or  other forms of labor. Many of these men were beaten, poorly fed, raped, and worked to death. They would die of tuberculosis, syphilis  and pneumonia.”

    Blackmon, born in Arkansas,  said he was working on a book about American corporate involvement in the slave trade and in massive forced labor camps when he discovered a series of crude grave yards which were used in an area near Birmingham, Alabama,  by the  Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company.  It was a subsidiary of the U.S. Steel Corporation, which owned the Alabama coal mine where the Blacks worked.

   “I discovered the graveyard was used by the company to bury the men once they died,” said Blackmon. “The graveyard now is overgrown with grass and trees. You could see where the old coal mining operation existed because railroad tracks ran nearby.  Many of the men were

Posted April 2, 2008

 
     buried in these graveyards in the same place where they  threw garbage and construction refuse. Other bodies were incinerated in blast furnaces where they used to make coke from the coal.  Many bodies were never found after mine shafts collapsed. They never bothered to dig them out.
     “A lot of people have  talked about the kidnapping and enslavement of black men for years during the early 1900s but there was never anything uncovered to prove it,” said Blackmon. “The families of these black men were helpless. They could not talk to the  local officials or the police.  
      Blackmon said “he uncovered 30,000 letters in the National Archives from white and black people who reported their family and folks they knew who were kidnapped and forced to work in the camps and mines. But the federal government did nothing. They threw the letters into brown envelopes and filed them away.”
       Blackmon said there are similarities and differences between traditional slavery that was practiced before the Civil War and Neo-Slavery which emerged in the 1880s and ended in the 1940s.
       “To buy a plantation-era slave, you paid about $2,000 to $5,000 and that made a slave very valuable,” said Blackmon. “But a neo-slave was  bought for about $30.  Black slaves  before the Civil War, of course, were beaten and kept in servitude. Traditional slaves were not killed, and to protect his investment, the owner allowed slave families to live together because slave owners wanted children who would become slaves. Many Neo-slaves did not see family or friends because they died before they left servitude.”
       Blackmon said after the federal troops were pulled from the  South, Reconstruction ended and Blacks were left unprotected from Whites who wanted to oppress them and direct revenge because of the humiliating way the Union treated Whites after the war.
       There were no efforts by state and local governments to stop this post-civil war form of bondage until the Theodore Roosevelt Administration. Blackmon said the Roosevelt Administration investigated, arrested, tried and even jailed many Whites who practiced enslavement of Blacks.
       “Roosevelt did that because he had a secret relationship with Booker T. Washington, who served as one of his advisers on race issues,” said Blackmon.  “But when Roosevelt’s secret communications with Washington were discovered, the President weakened to the political pressure placed on him.  So all of the people who were arrested for  enslaving black people were pardoned. And the Administration stopped all other investigations.”

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