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Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: the re-enslavement of Black people in America from the Civil War to World War II / Douglas A. Blackmon. New York: Doubleday, c2008.

The idea that slavery ended when Abraham Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation, this isn’t the truth. Slavery carried on but in another name and to this day still is a part of the American Justice system. Slavery by Another Name, written by Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light a subject that many African American already knew. He illuminates the understanding that many blacks have had since the 1800s. Blackmon gives the reader an historic account of America’s dark past touching of the root of the generations of mistrust that African Americans have about the justice system in the United States. Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. The book also received the 2009 American Book Award, the 2009 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Non-fiction Book Prize, and the 2008 Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Award, among others. It appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List in both hardcover and paperback editions. After 16 years as a senior editor and correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, Blackmon became a contributing editor of the Washington Post and joined the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs in 2012, as Chair of the Miller Center Forum, a nationally syndicated weekly television program focused on congressional and presidential public policy and elevating the nation’s public discourse (http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/about-the-author/). America hasn’t addressed the issues of the past, one being the issue of slavery. The years following the Civil War, southern states would make laws as a means of holding blacks to the plantations that they had been enslaved on. Blackmon backs up a point made in class that whites of the time made up stories accusing blacks of going around stealing and committing other crimes. Blackmon writes that according to many conventional historians, slaves were unable to handle the emotional complexities of freedom and had been conditioned by generations of bondage to become thieves (p.5). This was used to justify forcing blacks into labor camps. The practice of contracting labor was a commonplace on the plantations. In this case U.S Steel they used laws of the land unjustly to make a profit. Blackmon calls the new form of oppression Neo-Slavery, forcing blacks into labor camps, large farms. This placed a toll on the black men who were enslaved, for lack of a better term. Blackmon states that whites turn away from the past without dealing with the truths in the present. In many respects this is the core of race relations in the United States. Blackmon goes on the say that America forced Germany after World War II to deal with the aftermath, while America has failed to acknowledge her own past. With emancipation came the promise of land and freedom. African Americans for the first time saw promise. This would be short lived. In reading the lines from the book, I keep hearing, “when you take one step forward, you take three steps back.” During the years of reconstruction era, white people found ways around the laws by writing in clauses that would place African American back in bondage. Whites in the south used fear and superstition to keep blacks bound to the land. When that failed the night riders or the Klu Klux Klan stepped in to instill fear in the minds of blacks for generations to come. In my opinion Douglas A. Blackmon wants the reader to understand that freed African Americans didn’t have a friend in Andrew Johnson. Blacks soon found out the land they had been granted was quickly taken away. Blackmon points out that the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude except as punishment for a crime, was used as a tool to usher in a new system of slavery in the South. He goes on to say that blacks for any reason could find themselves in jail. Giving accounts in his book Douglas A. Blackmon addresses stresses the fact that the government wasn’t much help. When President Theodore Roosevelt came to office blacks in the south thought that something would be done to stop the forced slavery taking place in the South. Before Texas joined the Union, there was a system in Mexico called the use of laborers bound in servitude because of debt or a system of convict labor by which convicts were released to contractors. One story that stands out is of Greene Cottingham. He was born some years after the Civil War, and he would soon find himself in the system of forced slavery. The years of forced slavery in the South would eventually be investigated by the Federal Government. Blackmon talks about the hundreds of letters that were written seeking help to have family members freed from these camps. Blackmon recalls during his investigation he found letters in the Justice Department’s archives requesting President Roosevelt’s help. Many of these letters went unanswered. However, because of events taking place in Texas, the federal government soon passed laws banning peonage the use of laborers bound in servitude because of debt and a system of convict labor by which convicts are leased to contractors. Many whites of the time soon found themselves under investigation for breaking these laws. For many African Americans the south had become an unsafe place. The early part of the 20th Century African Americans moved out of the south seeking to rid themselves of the hardships the southern laws enforced. Cities like New York, Chicago. And Detroit became the Promised Land that many had heard of in the stories of the Bible. As Kevin Boyle said in his book, Arc of Justice a Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, the long train ride from the south seeking a better life in the north, and freedom from Jim Crow Laws, presented a picture of the north as a land of opportunity. There is a sense of opportunism in a new world free from Slavery by Another Name.