Slavery by Another Name
Students are taught in most schools that slavery ended with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. However after reading Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name I am clearly convinced that slavery continued for many years afterward. It is shown throughout this book that slavery did not end until 1942, this is when the condition of what Blackmon refers to as "neoslavery" began. Neoslavery was practiced after the Emancipation Proclamation and until the beginning of World War II. Neoslavery was the practice of abducting African Americans, and/or imprisoning them based on exaggerated or false criminal charges, and forcing them into servitude long after the days of the Civil War. This practice was maintained mostly throughout Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. The arbitrary use of ill defined “vagrancy” charges, such as obscene language in front of a female, changing jobs without the permission of a person’s former employer, and having no proof of having a job or work (which at the time was impossible for anyone because there was no use of pay stubs) were used to lock up millions of African-Americans who were compelled into or lived under the shadow of the South's new forms of coerced labor. Under the laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands were detained, hit with high fines and charged with the costs of their arrests. With no means to pay such debts, prisoners were sold into coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroad construction crews, and plantations. The book begins by describing a typical family immediately after the Civil War and the first fruits of freedom. Throughout the book, we follow the life of one Green Cottenham as he tries to raise a family in the Deep South during the 1900’s. As the beginning of the 20th century, he is arrested in Columbiana, Alabama, outside the train depot in a completely spurious situation where initially it's claimed that he broke one minor law, and then later it's claimed that he