Slavery by Another Name

The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

By: Douglas A. Blackmon

Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris

Length: 15 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

Pulitzer Prize, General Nonfiction, 2009

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.

Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Douglas A. Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude shortly thereafter.

By turns moving, sobering, and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the companies that profited most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

©2009 Douglas A. Blackmon (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

“Shocking....Eviscerates one of our schoolchildren's most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War.” ( The New York Times)

“The genius of Blackmon's book is that it illuminates both the real human tragedy and the profoundly corrupting nature of the Old South slavery as it transformed to establish a New South social order.” ( The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Wow, what a telling story!

Listening to this audiobook gave me so much insight into the complex and heinous beginnings of our current policing system in the United States. I think it should be required reading in the criminal justice programs taught today.

Ignorance is no Excuse

In a review of “Separate”, Steve Luxenburg’s commendable history of the Plessy v Ferguson decision, I wrote that there was still a need for a similarly thorough treatment of the Jim Crow era that followed that decision.

I was wrong. Douglas Blackmon’s book is a definitive treatment of the postbellum re-subjugation of African Americans in the south. The history is both readable and scholarly; it is both condensed and detailed. It does not take the reader long to understand how the horrifically efficient convict labor system was used to return vast numbers of black citizens to involuntary servitude. And yet Blackmon adds case after well-researched, specific case to demonstrate how this system persisted for 80 years after the end of the Civil War.

Q.E.D. By the end of the book, there can be no rebuttal to Blackmon’s contention that in the United States, “real slavery did not end until 1945.” Nor can the reader “wonder as to the origins, depth, and visceral foundations of so many African-Americans’ fundamental distrust of our judicial processes.”

This book reset my thinking on race relations, on affirmative action programs, on Black Lives Matter movements, on reparations. I don’t know how I’ll eventually work these issues out, but henceforward my thinking will be based on a fundamentally more honest and sympathetic acknowledgement of proximal white responsibility for the tragic and chronic inter-racial dysfunction that plagues this country.

WoW!What A Story!

I so appreciate the research and work that went into Mr. Blackmons story that actually is a good history lesson. He brings to life the experiences of the African Americans affected by terrors of convict leasing and the judicial prejudice. He also gives us a look inside the economy and businesses that play a role in the success of the terrorization of the people. This book is one thst could lend to the discussions of reparations and reconciling the issues of post slavery in America.

History being repeated.

This book was recommended by a dear friend. I think I felt every emotion while listening. I've just finish and I'm sobbing. It inspires me to continue my volunteering with a new fervor. As I prepare to leave the south, I recognize the undertones in this state I was born in still harbors a superiority attitude and it is reflected by most of our local elected representatives. The antics they pull are history being repeated.

Magnificent

Great Narrator, thank your for your work and insight. this is vital information and knowledge.

I had no idea

Wow. What a powerful book that shook me up. I had no idea that we Americans continued to enslave African Americans after the civil war through the 40’s all with the federal governments approval. No wonder we continue to have race relation issues in the US. Should be a must read. All it takes for evil to flourish is good men to do nothing.

Haunting and sobering

This book should be required reading in any and all US History classes. I thought I had a grasp on institutional racism in our country, but I had no idea just how bad things were and how that history influences our contemporary society.

Completely horrifying, but ABSOLUTELY necessary story

I am a budding 22-year-old archaeologist interested in the antebellum, reconstruction, and Jim Crow eras of African American history. This audiobook now serves as part of my research for my senior undergraduate honors thesis. Until this book, I never knew about this period of neo-Slavery, and found myself ashamed of this fact, and ashamed of the fact that we were were never taught about this as children. As an extension, I presume that millions of my fellow countrymen and women have never learned of this period either. I fully agree with Mr. Blackmon that the historical timeline for slavery in the United States needs rewriting, and I thank Mr. Blackmon heartily for writing this astounding and necessary piece of historical analysis. I recommend this book to ALL Americans, in order to understand how much of our collective history has been obscured or revised to make white Americans (and corporate giants) more comfortable with, or forget entirely, their own history of tyranny. As a white woman, I whole-heartedly recognize this fact and wish to remedy it to the best of my ability in my future career. My sincere thanks to Mr. Blackmon and Audible for enlightening me on this topic.
-Emily

Brutally honest and necessary for our time

I applaud this work in its entirety.

This book presents history in a straightforward no-nonsense format addressing one of the greatest falsehoods of the abolishment of slavery and the purposes of local law enforcement agencies.

There are ugly truths in this book that are hard to listen to. The horrors of the prisoner leasing system were somehow more horrific than even the stories I have heard or watched in documentaries about slavery, which is hard to believe.

Books like this one should be required high school reading. This book shows the prejudice and racism that is interwoven into every aspect of American culture, through the economy, housing, job market, social customs, politics, and the justice system.

scholarly

I would consider this worthy for textbook usage, I would recommend it highly, loved the tone of the narrator