Neo-Slavery in the South Revealed
(a Review)

Cardinal Bemardin’s pro-life vision was a multi-colored, inclusive robe, woven into whose texture were fewer abortions, peace-making, economic justice and healthcare for all, racial and ethnic good will, etc. While November 4th lifts our hopes for dealing with these issues, sensitivity to the past “sins of our white fathers” should serve as a helpful, penitential slice of humble pie.

Douglas Blackmon’s recent book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II reexamines the subject matter of W.E.B. DuBois’ aborted research project a century ago. Blackmon says: 

DuBois went to Lowndes County, Alabama, in hopes of capturing an unassailable, empirically proven portrait of the penury and exploitation that African Americans there—and by extension most of the South—were forced to endure. With funding from the Federal Bureau of Labor, the DuBois team fanned across the countryside carrying ten thousand copies of questionnaires containing a battery of piercing questions regarding land ownership, labor control, family life, education, sexual mores, morality, political activity, and other aspects of black life. By late fall 1906, more than 21,000 of the county’s black farmers had been interviewed through a cabin-to-cabin canvas, with researchers scrupulously recording the answers and compiling tables of responses back at the school [Atlanta University] … No social study on such a scale of research and ambition had ever been undertaken in the United States, certainly not one focused on black life and, even more so, never one attempted in the environment of overt physical danger that existed in Lowndes County. The report was completed, written by hand, and delivered to the Bureau of Labor for publication … A year later, after months of pushing for publication of his research, or at the very least that the document be returned, DuBois was informed that the study’s conclusions “touched on political matters.” It could not be sent to him because it had been destroyed.

Blackmon searched court records, census data, and other material to document the kind of evidence destroyed in DuBois’ project, viz. that, after Reconstruction in the South, white plantation owners, politicians and industrialists, with the complicity of Northern capitalists, established a legal code that effectively criminalized black life. When a black man, arrested on flimsy charges, was unable to pay court costs, he would be carried off by a white hustler who paid the state or county for the convict’s fines owed and, later, work done. The “slave by another name” was impressed into hard labor on farms and in coal mines, quarries, steel mills, and lumber camps; he worked there until he paid off his debts or, more likely, died.

This eye-opening book digs up decades of injustice that deferred black folks’ dreams like Raisins Dried in the Sun. We have come far in race relations within our country since then; if we are to travel the road of world-wide peace, the painful lessons to be learned here should guide our relations with the peoples of other cultures, religions and races.

Frank McGinty
Frank is a member of CPF

Visit www.slaverybyanothername.com for images,
primary research materials, interviews and reviews of the book.

Ask not, doubt not. You have, my heart, already chosen the joy of Advent. As a force against your own uncertainty, bravely tell yourself, “It is the Advent of the great God.” Say this with faith and love, and then both the past of your life, which has become holy, and your life’s eternal, boundless future will draw together in the now of this world. For then into the heart comes the one who is Advent, the boundless future who is already in the process of coming, the Lord, who has already come into the time of the flesh to redeem it. 

Karl Rahner

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