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Ellison Horne
Historic Achievement Toward Greater Insight and Reconciliation,
As an African American (bi-racial Black/White) I can attest to the facts and stories Mr. Blackmon presents, as told to me by my father who only upon his deathbed, felt safe enough to reveal. Growing up in Jasper Texas in the 1920’s, he was picking cotton at age 7 and driving tractors at age 9. The atmosphere for Blacks was a living holocaust, where my father witnessed the lynching of his boyhood friend at age 13, where oppression was a daily experience for Blacks; even in the most simple terms of human interaction, where making eye-contact when addressing Whites was considered untenable and subject to harsh retribution.
Indeed, Mr. Blackmon goes far beyond these traditional understandings of racial practices, and brings new, deeper knowledge of how slavery had merely been retooled to accommodate the unforeseen realities of emancipation, allowing it to flourish for many more decades in what Blackmon calls the “Age of Neoslavery”.
Resulting from the recent history-making speech on race by Presidential hopeful, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, there is huge public interest in reaching a more comprehensive understanding of race relations in our nation. The fact is, public response to Sen. Obama’s speech has uncapped an overwhelming outpouring of public interest, writings, and dialogue.
Mr. Blackmon had a similar experience back in 2001, when his article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on how U.S. Steel Corp. relied on the forced labor of Blacks. This too received massive public response expressing appreciation and sincere interest to learn more. Hence, after 7 years of exhaustive research and interviews, Slavery by Another Name arrives at a time our nation, facing a historic general election, is contemplating race as never before. And Mr. Blackmon’s pioneering work is helping us to break new ground toward a path of greater insight and reconciliation.
– Ellison Horne
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|Daniel Hurley
Briiliant History of the Post Civil War Enslavement of African Americans,
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|Herbert L Calhoun
Another Missing Chapter in American History,
Who won the Civil War?
Introduction
According to the subtext of this book, the answer depends on what is meant by the question. If you mean militarily, then of course there is no question but that the North won the war. However, if you mean who won the hearts, minds and souls of white America, then it is equally clear from the evidence that unfolded over the next one hundred years, that the winner was the South.
It matters little that each side had different goals and more importantly different pretexts to disguise its goals. In retrospect, and from any angle, this book’s focus on “forced labor” proves that the result are all the same: For the North, “ending slavery” was just a pretext to gain control over the lucrative cotton markets and gain hegemony over the South, and do so at the time cotton drove the international economy in the same way that oil drives it today. However, it was the South that kept its eye on the ball. Unlike the North, the South was un-conflicted about the full meaning and importance of slavery: Southerners knew at a deep level that slavery was not only the lynch pen of the Southern way of life, it was the existential process that defined what it meant to be a white man in America, period.
Thus, if the war was about the existential existence of white maleness, then clearly this book, and the unfolding of the next 100 years of American history that it describes, proves that the South won the Civil War. Because this author makes it as clear as the sun is in the sky, that since the South’s victory, wherever the South goes, the North is sure and soon to follow. It is this story, so skillfully buried within the subtext of this book that makes it such an important contribution to American history.
The Book
This is a masterful and scholarly story about the re-enslavement of blacks, as that process began in the aftermath of the Civil War. It took place when “Reconstruction” was willingly dismantled by the ruling North-South coalition of the day, codified in the compromise of 1876, which ended in the election of Rutherford B. Hayes. As blacks (and any real chance for a true democratic America) were thrown under the bus, “Reconstruction” ended. Northern soldiers left blacks to their own devices, and a conscious period of southern lawlessness and violence ensued. Southern Rebels renamed this period of violence and lawlessness “the Redemption.”
This very thoughtful and carefully written manuscript is told through the rigors of the author’s own prodigious research, which includes many private and previously undisturbed records, research that is seen through the life and lineage of one black man, named Green Cottingham. Green serves as the historical prototype and “stand-in” for tens of thousands of anonymous Blacks who did not manage to survive the forced labor camps. Like many of them, Green too was arrested on “trumped up” charges of vagrancy at the tender age of 14 and spent the rest of his youth and a great deal of his adulthood in a new kind of “existential slavery” called “forced labor” work camps run by the likes of the infamous U.S. Steel Company, in and around the environs of Birmingham, Alabama.
During the “Redemption,” “forced labor” became the organizing concept upon which the “new Slavery” was built. It appeared in several guises, for instance, as debt peonage, sharecropping, indentured or contract servitude, forced work camps, and prison release farms, as well as ordinary prisons, among others — all forms that were clearly (after the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment) both illicit and illegal.
But since various forms of forced labor continued to serve the immediate needs of a fearful and prostrate South, and no one cared, forced labor became the de facto, legal standard and status of the black condition in the South. Through it, Blacks effectively were returned to slavery during a time when (just as had been the case during the Civil War), southerners had no choice but to become dependent on Blacks for running their farms, helping to build railroads and transportation systems, and fueling the factories that ran the war, and re-establishing the industrial energy and might of the South. In short, the very existence of the southern way of life depended critically on both black skills and black labor -all at a time and in a region very much “cash strapped” due to losses during the Civil War.
The prototype, which greased the wheels of the “forced labor” stratagem was the collusion between big Northern corporations, such as U.S. Steel, and corrupt Southern municipal officials such as local town judges, sheriffs and others, who together saw it as their patriotic duty to deny and bar Negroes from exercising their newly won freedoms. And, to the extent possible, to eliminate them in every area of life from being potential competitors of the white race generally, and the white…
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