Name: Slavery by another name
ISBN: 9780385722704

Slavery by another name

In this groundbreaking historical expose, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history--an "Age of Neoslavery" that thrived from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.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. 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. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations--including U.S. Steel--looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.The neoslavery system exploited legal loopholes and federal policies that discouraged prosecution of whites for continuing to hold black workers against their wills.

What Hacker News says

sitkackJan 2025

Very good writing and thorough coverage.

> A central element of the Black Codes was “vagrancy” laws. Through a system known as “convict leasing”, many African-American boys and men were arrested for minor offences such as vagrancy, imprisoned, and then leased out to work for private businesses. This created a new system of forced labour which again was little more than slavery. Convict leasing was legally rooted in the so-called “exception clause” of the 13th Amendment which states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”

This is I think the primary reason our justice system is so messed up. Convict Leasing was and is a barbaric practice.

I highly recommend this book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_by_Another_Name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_leasing

> For example, in 1898, 73% of Alabama's annual state revenue came from convict leasing.

To think we are turning a blind eye to this in the world. It makes the US even more of a hypocrite.

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giraffe_ladySep 2023

There's an excellent and pulitzer-winning book about this widespread dynamic called "slavery by another name." The practice continued routinely in huge swathes of the south until world war 1, and in a few places decades even after that.

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jahajaJul 2020

That's outrageously ahistorical. The former slaves weren't suddenly "free" and unexploited in the US after the civil war. In many aspects they were still enslaved through various direct and indirect means.

If you're interested in not just regurgitating propaganda you can read this book: "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II".

Furthermore your entire premise is false, even if we accept what you suggest is true, which is highly controversial, the result is not what we're talking about, but the incentive structure and what outcomes that will produce. Of course people searching to accumulate capital will endorse and proliferate low labour costs if it's possible and currently acceptable.

You do realize that both slavery and wage slavery have a cost of manufacturing right? Both needed to compete with that on the world market. What's the reason to exclude that even a slave-owning South wouldn't have switched to a more profitable produce?

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cf498Jun 2019

Slavery by another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon is a good book on the topic. Its not so clear cut that the civilwar actually ended slavery, it took quite a bit longer to end slavery like conditions.

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cf498Jun 2019

Prison labor has a long tradition as been seen as a source of income in form of a cheap involuntary labor. To the point that you got people imprisoned on arbitrary laws to keep that workforce large enough. Many states exploited this hard after the ban of slavery, to the degree that offenses where made up, like not being allowed to change your employer as a freemen in order to keep the slave like workforce large enough. If you look at the history its hard to pin the moment where this ought to have ended. After the worst offenders of openly racist laws aimed at forcing people into slave like conditions got revoked and three wars relying on the draft happened, the war on drugs had started with another set of arbitrary prosecutions. The history of incentives to acquire more prisoners is quite a bit older then the private prison complex.

edit: About the history of prison labor as a replacement for slavery, "Slavery by another Name" by Douglas A. Blackmon is a great book on the topic.

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euroclydonMay 2017

Bricks made in Birmingham in the 20's, turpentine plantations... Reminds me of the forced labor chronicled in Slavery by Another Name, which is a great read that I highly recommend.

https://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-A...

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