Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Blackmon describes Slope No. 12 as “the finest prison ever built in Alabama” (310) because Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad spent an enormous amount of money updating the technology in its mines. Ironically, the mine was built on property acquired from a Black Methodist church.

After US Steel acquired TCI, it expanded the mines further. The company signed a contract with Jefferson County to acquire every single prisoner that the county arrested in 1908; the company paid $60,000—an amount worth $1.1. million at the time of the book’s creation. The free white workers in the mine resented the Black men not only due to racism but because the company could use enslaved labor to break up the free workers’ strikes for better pay. Blackmon writes how African Americans throughout Alabama heard horror stories about the Pratt Mines, including stories about Black men being sent there and never escaping.

Life at the mines was brutal—and not just because of the physical labor. Shortly after Slope No. 12 opened in 1907, tuberculosis and pneumonia killed nine of the prisoners. Sometimes, coal slabs unexpectedly broke free and fell, killing the workers. Other times workers died in the explosions generated to separate coal from the surrounding rock. The dead were usually buried in hasty graves in fields outside the mine.

Blackmon writes about the harsh daily routine of Green and the other workers, who rode into the mines using the same carts that transported the coal out. Many of the tunnels were so narrow that the workers needed to lie on their stomachs and slide to move around. The slaves had to load the carts with coal quickly; they were rushed along by an overseer who was often another unpaid Black laborer worried that he would be whipped if not enough coal were produced. However, the men were fed somewhat regularly, and there was an onsite doctor available who treated diseases like malaria and Black lung disease.

Blackmon takes care to describe the occasionally violent nature of the workers, citing a white prisoner who said that men “degraded to a plane lower than the brutes, are guilty of the unmentionable crimes referred to by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans” (317). Men often killed each other in fights in the mines, and young boys who were sent to work in the mines were raped regularly by older workers.

Because these men were largely illiterate, there were few firsthand written accounts about life in the mines. One of the few that exists, “The Story of a Lie,” was published by a worker named Alvaran Snow Allen and focused on his time in a labor prison. In addition to regular whippings, which slaves in the mines endured if they failed to perform their tasks to their enslavers’ desire, Allen described other forms of horrific torture. These included being suspended from the ceiling and the “pick shackle”—a pick head attached to a prisoner’s ankle that prevented them from walking normally. The most brutal and common torture was known as the “water cure,” in which men were doused with cold water until they felt like they were drowning. This was popular because the men could quickly go back to work afterward.

Although the president of US Steel visited the mines, no changes are made to the working conditions or the presence of enslaved labor. Meanwhile, seven thousand free miners—500 of whom were Black—went on strike for better working conditions, blocking the entrance to the mines. The mining company abuses the slaves even further to keep the mines operating during the strike. They also hired a white foreman to bring in Black workers from farms, allowing the white men to supervise the workers. The prospect of free Black and white workers unifying upset the company and white Southerners, so they tried to break up on the strike by pitting the races against each other. Meanwhile, Green was diagnosed with syphilis, which caused him tremendous suffering. There was no cure for syphilis at the time, and Green lost the ability to control his legs. He also contracted tuberculosis and eventually died. Other workers put Green’s body in a pine box and buried him in the fields outside the mines, though the exact location of his body remains unknown.

Blackmon opens the chapter by describing a mob of 12,000 white people that gathered in Springfield, Illinois—Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace and the same place where Roosevelt promised a square deal for Black Americans. When a white woman’s affair with a Black man was discovered, she falsely accused him of rape. As a result, seven Black people were killed and the town’s African American section was largely destroyed. Peace was only restored when four thousand soldiers arrived. Blackmon then describes a series of other violent white mobs throughout the South that lynched Black people, particularly those accused of crimes against white women.

Meanwhile, the free white and Black workers were still striking outside the Alabama mines. The three major coal companies in the area—Sloss-Sheffield; Pratt Consolidated Coal; and Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad—were prepared to do anything to halt the strike. The Alabama governor was upset by the implications of Black and white workers striking together, stating that he was “outraged at the attempts to establish social equality between Black and white miners” (326). He sent an armed militia to break up the strike. In the Pratt Mines, forced laborers tried to escape by using explosives to open an iron gate, instead setting a fire that killed several men.

In the first year of US Steel’s management, 60 of the Black forced laborers died. When men died, a local coroner visited the mines to write a report; many died in abandoned tunnels beneath the earth—known as the “gob”—that were filled with methane gas and toxic runoff. Blackmon notes one instance where a jury of coroners was used to excuse company liability in worker deaths, as the company claimed it was taking reasonable precautions to prevent death.

Blackmon reintroduces Erskine Ramsey, who was previously a chief of operations for Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad. In 1904, Ramsey merged many small companies to form the Pratt Consolidated Coal Company with the goal of creating a wildly profitable industrial enterprise for the South. That ambition resulted in more forced laborers in the mines, harsher working conditions, and more slaves dying. The three major coal companies produced close to 15 million tons of coal each year and had more than 3,000 enslaved Black workers. Hundreds of forced laborers worked in turpentine camps and lumber mills in Alabama, while an untold number of enslaved people worked on private farms. Between this system of forced labor, political and economic suppression, and lynching, Black Southerners lost all hope for true independence. Blackmon states, “The new slavery of Alabama achieved its zenith” (331).

Two of the most notorious Alabama participants in neo-slavery were the brothers William M. and Robert B. Teal, who served as sheriffs in rural Barbour County, which produced a lot of cotton. The two sheriffs sent 691 Black forced laborers to the coal mines over a 10-year period, arresting more men during times of labor shortages.

Blackmon shifts focus to Martin Danzy, a Black sharecropper. Police arrested Danzy while investigating the death of another Black man, though there was no record of the actual charge. Danzy was sentenced to 25 years of hard labor, sold to a lumber company, and died of pneumonia five months later. Blackmon returns to Danzy’s story in a later chapter.

Elbert H. Gary, the founding chairman of US Steel, was upset when he learned of the convict labor taking place in the company’s mines. He ordered the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad president to stop using forced labor, but the enslaved labor continued. US Steel wrote in correspondence with state officials that it was unwilling to give up its cheaply produced iron and steel generated from forced labor, especially since it was a means of preventing free workers from unionizing.

Blackmon concludes the chapter by noting a surprising incident in which five white men are captured and sold into slavery. However, unlike Black men, who generally received long sentences, these men were sentenced to only 10 days’ labor each.

The state of Georgia held a set of hearings on its participation in convict leasing. State Senator Thomas Helder was at the head of the investigation; he and other officials hoped to expose corruption in Georgia’s handling of convict laborers. They learned of crimes much worse than corruption in the hearings. They found more than 3,500 men and 100 women living in outright forced labor in Georgia, with at least 600 slaves being resold to other buyers. Abuse of slaves was rampant in the camps, and working conditions were incredibly unhygienic. A 14-year-old Black boy, Daniel Long, testified that he was whipped 75 times on some days in the turpentine camp where he was enslaved. When his mother received notice that Daniel was likely to die, she went to the camp and took him home.

James W. English, the owner of Durham Coal & Coke and the Chattahoochee Brick Company and founder of the Georgia Pacific Railroad company, was also involved in the hearings. English was a member of Atlanta’s wealthy elite and the city’s former mayor. His business, which turned a healthy profit, relied heavily on the new form of convict enslaved labor. In his testimony, he acknowledged using convict labor but denied that any abuse of workers took place on company property. He also revealed that slaves performed immense amounts of backbreaking labor using outdated manufacturing techniques. Blackmon describes the physical abuse laid upon prisoners in English’s factories, including one worker who was whipped to death. The prison workers in the brick factory produced $239,402 worth of bricks—$5.2 million in modern-day value. The brick factory also served as an unofficial slave auction; people bought the factory’s workers, who were being resold.

The hearing also investigated Joel Hurt, a wealthy Atlanta real estate developer. He bought a series of mines from a former Georgia governor and ran them using leased convict labor. He also sold coal to Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad because they required more coal than their own mines can produce. Hurt was fond of whipping and thought the guards in his camps did not punish the workers enough. As news of the hearings spread around the state, opposition formed. The Atlanta city council banned the purchase of convict-made goods, and the state legislature—made up entirely of white officials—voted to abolish the forced labor system. Other states, like Mississippi and South Carolina, had already banned the leasing of prisoners—though not necessarily for moral reasons. Mississippi banned convict leasing because the governor wanted to hurt his rich enemies. When the enslaved labor system ended, profits dropped dramatically at English’s brick factory, and in the immediate years after the law passed, more states banned forced labor.

However, Blackmon writes, forced labor did not disappear—it merely evolved. Florida’s convict leasing system was immense—as was Alabama’s—and withstood efforts for reforms. States that banned forced labor did so either because changing technology made it unnecessary or because the cost of leasing convicts was too high for companies to tolerate. In Georgia, though forced laborers no longer worked in mines, they were put on chain gangs—groups of prisoners shackled together to do hard labor, such as public road maintenance. The attorney general and the White House continued receiving reports of forced labor, and the attorney general authorized an investigation that was carried out by Warren Reese’s successor in Alabama. The investigation found numerous accounts of forced labor and abuse, but Alabama declined to investigate any of these cases. The federal government said it did not have jurisdiction to prosecute slavery cases, and the state courts refused to hold white men accountable. Therefore, there was little justice. Even free Black laborers—like Alabama’s 700,000 sharecroppers—were essentially living in a form of peonage because they gave up most of their crops in exchange for rent and use of supplies. In 1909, on more than 850,000 farms in the South, free Black laborers received a total of less than $79 in compensation.

In 1912, Woodrow Wilson—an open white supremacist—was elected president. His administration began a policy of discriminating against Black workers in the federal government and segregating bathrooms and office spaces. He supported the Southern states’ desire to handle their issues around race and Black voting without federal interference. Regarding Black disenfranchisement and loss of political power, Blackmon writes, “Wilson called the eventual suppression of Black political activity ‘the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites’” (358). When The Birth of a Nation—the blockbuster movie based on the racist play The Clansman—was released, Wilson enthusiastically supported the film’s message and approval of the Ku Klux Klan. Even seemingly progressive individuals fell into racist tropes of African Americans; a socialist publication, The Masses, routinely hosted cartoons that depicted African Americans as having exaggerated facial features and acting buffoonishly.

In 1920, a white farmer in rural Georgia named John S. Williams took a Black prisoner, “Iron John,” to his plantation to work as a convict. After being whipped intensely, Iron John begged to be killed, so Williams shot him and dumped the body into a pond. Federal investigators received reports of abuse on Williams’s farm from an escaped convict, and Williams denied the accusations. The investigators departed without further inquiry because none of Williams’s other Black workers corroborated the reports. Moreover, they thought it was unlikely that a Georgia jury would convict a white man of slavery. But Williams grew paranoid that he would be tried before a grand jury, so he decided to dispose of the evidence of his crimes. With the help of a Black worker, he murdered the 11 remaining convicts so that they could never testify against him. He dumped their bodies in the river, which ironically caught the attention of the investigators he sought to avoid. As bodies started turning up, the federal investigators returned, and Williams became the only man convicted of murdering a Black man between 1877 and 1966.

Despite that, the federal government was not taking the matter of slavery in the South seriously. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation—which would become the FBI—declined to investigate a particularly cruel whipping of a Black worker in a textile mill because it was not within the department’s jurisdiction. Nonetheless, the system of neo-slavery began to collapse; technological advancements made the use of manual labor unpractical. As cotton prices fell due to a disease wracking the fields, fewer slaves were needed on the plantations as well.

Public outcry against forced labor began to rise, especially when cases like Martin Tarbert emerged. Tarbert was a 21-year-old Midwestern white man who was arrested for riding a train without a ticket while traveling in the South. He was then leased into forced labor in a turpentine camp where, after a harsh whipping, he died. His family launched an investigation into his death, and a year later, the Florida legislature banned prisoner whipping. Slavery continued to grow in Alabama, however; the number of enslaved convicts grew to more than 30,000 over a one-year period in the 1920s. When another white convict laborer died in Alabama, the public outcry grew as they realized white people were caught up in this slavery practice as well. Seeing growing opposition to leased convict labor in the mines, the Alabama governor moved convicts out of the mines and into chain gangs. Black workers from Flat Top Mine were transported to Kilby prison. A Black man named Henry Tinsley arrived at the prison as well. As a child, Tinsley had been enslaved on John Pace’s farm. After leaving Pace’s farm, Tinsley fought in World War II, married, and had a child. Then, he was arrested for assault with intent to murder, found guilty, and re-enslaved.

Although Georgia technically outlawed the leasing of Black prisoners to private companies in 1908, forced labor was even more prevalent in 1930. Eight thousand Black men were forced to work in chain gangs, and half of the state’s 1.1 million African Americans worked uncompensated for white employers. They were unable to move freely or change jobs without fear of being forced into a chain gang.

Blackmon introduces John Spivak, a white writer who channeled his observations of forced labor conditions in Georgia in the 1930s into a fictionalized book. The Black protagonist, David Jackson, is arrested for seemingly no reason, sold into a chain gang, and resold to a cruel plantation farmer. After a few escape attempts, Jackson resigns himself to the fact that he will likely die a slave. Spivak bluntly showed how this system of neo-slavery existed primarily to intimidate Black Americans, even though a handful of white men were also caught in the system.

The nature of legal reforms in the South did not make slavery disappear; it simply made the system evolve. For example, though law enforcement officers were not selling slaves to coal mines in 1920s Alabama, they arrested and sold thousands of men—more than 30,000 in 1927—to work in chain gangs or for private landowners. These men were arrested on incredibly trivial charges, like possessing or selling alcohol, vagrancy, gambling, leaving an employer’s farm without permission, and “adultery,” known in this time as sexual relations between a Black man and a white woman.

Blackmon delves into the federal government’s complete lack of interest in enforcing the laws or holding white Southerners accountable. The government claimed to be unable to tackle most matters related to peonage or compulsory service; even those few cases of debt slavery that were investigated rarely resulted in a conviction. In 1941, US Attorney General Francis Biddle—a racist Northerner—was shocked to learn that the federal government allowed local counties in the South to handle all accusations of slavery. This hands-off federal policy meant there was no oversight of Southern counties that profited from slavery and little to no legal accountability or justice for enslaved people. Despite his own racism, Biddle understood that African Americans had been denied their fundamental rights as citizens.

Meanwhile, the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor, so the US was about to launch full-scale into World War II. This would require millions of African Americans to serve the war effort, so Biddle decided to make it clear once and for all that anyone who conducted convict slavery would be prosecuted. He wrote Circular No. 3591 to all federal prosecutors, directing them to build cases against slavery when allegations were made. Biddle also issued a memo stating that the Department of Justice should no longer refer to these cases as peonage and instead name them Involuntary Servitude and Slavery. Some, like FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, did not want to comply with Biddle’s orders. However, Biddle made this policy change not out of humanitarian concern for Black Southerners but for practical wartime considerations. He knew that the Japanese would use American racism against its Black populations to lure African Americans to their side, so the US government wanted to avoid slavery being used as wartime propaganda against it.

Civil rights lawyers began looking into old laws they could use to prosecute slavers, like the Slave Kidnapping Act. Federal courts ruled that someone could be held liable for debt peonage, even if the debt were fake, thus unravelling one of the slavers’ most-common defenses. A white farmer and his daughter were federally charged for enslaving and abusing a intellectually disabled Black man, and they were both found guilty. Thus, the federal government made its point about wanting to seriously end slavery. Still, it was not until 1951—90 years after the start of the Civil War—that Congress passed a law that officially made slavery a crime. By this point, modern equipment like tractors and chemicals had largely made enslaved labor obsolete, but change was still in the air.

Millions of Black soldiers returned from the horrors of Nazi Germany and started the civil rights movement to combat racism. In 1954, the Supreme Court desegregated schools in the Brown v. Board of Education decision and reversed the cruel Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, symbolically marking the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow era—or what Blackmon calls the era of “neoslavery.”

Blackmon finishes discussing his present-day search for traces of Green Cottenham. Though largely unsuccessful, he came close. He found Molly Cottenham, a descendant of the Black Cottinghams who was living in Shelby County and knew little of her family history. Blackmon then met Harold Cottingham, Elisha Cottingham’s white grandson, who said he was unaware of the extent to which his grandfather owned slaves. Harold was mostly told one-sided stories about how brave Elisha was for making a living in the wilds of Alabama.

Blackmon pivots to the fates of companies that used forced labor. Sloss-Sheffield Iron & Steel—which had the longest history of owning slave mines in Alabama—merged into another company, which was then acquired by Walter Industries, Inc. in 1969. The representatives for Walter Industries denied any knowledge of the past wrongdoings of the company it acquired. Today, Sloss-Sheffield exists in a subsidiary known as Sloss Industries. On its website, there is a description of the company having contributed to the city of Birmingham becoming an industrial center, but there is no mention of the slaves that made Alabama’s industry thrive. In a sad nod to its vulgar past, the company makes cheap homes that are largely marketed to Black consumers, some of whom are likely descendants of slaves who worked in the mines owned by companies like Sloss-Sheffield. Likewise, in a book about Tennessee Coal, Iron and & Railroad Company, US Steel made no mention of slaves working in the company’s.

Blackmon shows how the wealth generated in these slave mines trickled down even to major corporations like Coca-Cola through the descendants of James W. English and associates of Joel Hurt. He asked the heirs of this inherited, slave-produced wealth how they reckon with their family’s or corporation’s past. Blackmon spoke to Rodney Mims Cook Jr., a descendant James W. English. Cook was immersed in his family’s stories about English’s accomplishment and planned to build a museum about the great Atlanta families, including English. Cook and other descendants maintained that no abuse of African Americans occurred at the coal mines, brick factories, or lumber camps; like many other white Americans, they found it discomforting to talk about racial issues. Blackmon worries about how—if at all—the museum will talk about the neo-slavery that built these great families’ prosperity.

Many other corporations—including US Steel—that Blackmon talked to felt that it would be inappropriate to associate their company with wrongdoings from a century prior, especially in cases where they had merged after the era of slave mines. Blackmon notes that, legally, corporations have never been “asked to fully account for their roles as the primary enforcers of Jim Crow segregation, and not at all for engineering the resurrection of forced labor after the Civil War” (390). Instead, accountability during the civil rights era mostly focused on addressing injustice through the government. However, one corporation, Wachovia Bank, fully investigated its past. It acknowledged that its previous banks held hundreds of slaves before the Civil War. To make amends, it publicly apologized to African Americans, established scholarships for minorities, and promoted discussion on race in the company.

As he researched, Blackmon found that descendants of slaves were divided in whether they wanted to learn about neo-slavery. He cites the example of a young miner in 1940s Birmingham, Earl Brown, who at first did not believe the stories he heard about forced laborers. Instead, like many other African Americans at the time, Brown bought into the white mythology of good and bad Black people, which claimed that enslaved laborers were bad instead of attributing blame to the white men. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, this rhetoric was used when Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers were warned not to rile up the “docile ‘good’ Negroes” (394) in Lowndes County—a place rife with racism and white supremacy at the time.

In the process of researching this book, Blackmon contended with his own status as a white man from the South. Blackmon’s mother was born in the same county where some of the free Black Cottinghams ended up after they left the plantation. He recalls how his grandmother regaled him with tales of his family’s lore and of brave Confederate soldiers among his ancestors.

Finally, Blackmon talks to descendants of some of the men who were forced into slavery. He starts with Pearline Danzey, the 88-year-old matriarch of the extended family descended from Martin Danzy. Pearline talked about how frightening and difficult it was to grow up as a free Black person working in sharecropping. Ida, Pearline’s daughter, talked about growing up during the 1960s and fighting for civil rights, including integration of Black and white customers at a local white-only diner. Regarding the issue of post-Civil War slavery, Cynthia James—Pearline’s great-niece—said, “You can’t go back and change the past. Just don’t let it happen again” (399). Pearline’s granddaughter, Melissa Craddock, disagreed, saying that companies that profited from slavery after the Civil War should provide monetary compensation—or reparations—to the slaves’ descendants.

Blackmon tried to question Louis Cottingham, who lived in the same town where Green Cottenham’s mother moved after her son’s death. When Blackmon spoke to Louis’ wife over the phone, she said that no one there wanted to talk about slavery. Louis, after taking the phone from his wife, displayed a similar lack of interest in digging up his family history, even though Blackmon informed him that his family was descended from an enslaved African-born man named Scip.

Blackmon concludes: “As painful as it may be to plow the past, the ephemera left behind by generations crushed in the wheels of American white supremacy are telling explanations for the fissures that still thread our society” (402). He believes Americans need to look to the wrongs of the past to see how they contribute to racism and poverty inflicted upon Black Americans today. To this end, he argues that the Jim Crow era be renamed the Age of Neo-slavery.