During and immediately after Reconstruction in the
South, the same entrepreneurs and bankers who had built the
Confederacy’s munitions and armament plants during the Civil War
engineered a new form of industrial slavery. At its zenith in the early 20th century,
this new system of labor held millions of African-Americans as slaves to
the U.S. coal, steel, turpentine, lumber, housing, agricultural and
railroad industries in the South. This book is the story of how Southerners
created this complex and nuanced machinery of forced labor, maintained it
by using wholesale violence against manacled, black laborers, and, with
their Northern collaborators, made fortunes off of it.
The heart of story is that slavery in the American
South ended, not with the Emancipation Proclamation nor the end of the
Civil War, but only with the onset of World War II. The author discovered
this story by digging through county courthouses in Georgia, Alabama and
Florida which held the original arrest records and convict lease contracts
for hundreds of thousands of African-American males, incarcerated and
forgotten in this new form of slave labor which flourished between 1885 and
1940.
This is a tough story to tell without the proper
context. To his credit, the author sets forth a huge chunk of background
history so the general reader can make sense of the details. He writes of
how a new generation of African-Americans which came of age in the 1870s
found themselves enmeshed in it; of how Southern legislatures criminalized
all aspects of black behavior so the Southern states would have an abundant
and flexible supply of low-cost labor to lease out to capitalists; of how
the industrialists who benefited from this new slavery defeated efforts to
unionize black labor; and of how the federal Department of Justice’s
investigation of peonage in 1903 led to the prosecution of hundreds of
“slave contractors” and to the conviction of none.
What is surprising and compelling in this story is the
broad participation of Northern capitalists in the South’s lucre.
Firms such as U.S. Steel, Wachovia Bank Corp., Walter Industries, U.S. Pipe
and Foundry, U.S. Sugar, Coca Cola, Chattahoochee Brick, Georgia Pacific,
Inc., and Consolidated Lumber Products all invested in and profited
handsomely from convict lease slavery. When called by the author to account
in 2001 for their companies’ brutal labor schemes in the 20th century,
with one exception none of the CEOs would admit to their subsidiary’s
predatory practices, any responsibility for the deaths of tens of
thousands, or the psychological damage done to the African-Americans
ensnared in industrial slavery.
Accompanying the erection and development of this
industrial slavery in the 1880s and 90s was the rise of a more virulent and
deadly form of racism which undercut the paternalistic racism of the
pre-war South. Southern racists and social Darwinists unleashed
dehumanizing interpretations of the racial order which depicted blacks as
members of a degenerate culture and inclined towards animalistic violence
and lustful pursuits. Only by forcing black labor into contract slavery,
reasoned the apologists of this new slave labor, could the South maintain
discipline and decorum.
Racial proscription and increasing segregation in
Northern and border communities accompanied the spread of this racial venom
at the turn of the century. Violent race riots between 1900 and World War I
occurred in: Tulsa, Okla.; Evansville and Indianapolis, Ind.; Joplin, Mo.;
Peoria, East St. Louis and, of course, Springfield, Ill. Without exception,
the riots were caused by working class whites concerned primarily with the
progress and political influence of black professionals or, as the rioters
explained, “the arrogance of uppity blacks who think they can prove
their black asses equal to whites.” The results in Springfield
included the trashing and burning of the homes and businesses of successful
blacks in the levee district; harassment and destruction of the property of
sympathetic Jews; and the lynching of the two most successful black
entrepreneurs from lampposts by the white mob, according to In Lincoln’s Shadow: The 1908 Race Riot of
Springfield, Illinois, by Roberta Senechal de
la Roche.
As the race riots in the North and border states
demonstrated, the repercussions caused by black enslavement rippled
outward. The very system of enslavement ensnared and degraded millions of
black Americans in a system of slavery more deadly than the antebellum
variety; the ensuing racial virus justified the barbaric treatment of
blacks nationwide; and the financial arrangements of the convict lease
system and the disenfranchisement of blacks corrupted Southern and national
politics and culture for generations.
Carl Oblinger, former mayor of Chatham, is Assistant
Professor of Humanities and Political Science at Springfield College in
Illinois. He teaches courses on American society, foreign policy, and
American Government and Western Civilization.
Author Douglas A. Blackmon will speak about his book
at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 13, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in
Springfield. The presentation is free to the public, but reservations are
necessary. Call 217-558-8934.
The book will also be a subject of a panel discussion
on “Slavery and Other Issues After the Civil War” at 6 p.m.
Thursday, Oct. 30, at Beata Hall conference room inside the main building
at Springfield College in Illinois. The panel includes Bill Logan,
Springfield activist; Jim Lewis of the U.S. Attorney’s office; Khyran
Boyd, graduate student; and Carl Oblinger. The program will be repeated
Nov. 6.
This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2008.
