My sister asked me to watch the PBS special, Slavery by Another Name. I don’t know about you, but I have really have to psych myself up to watch one of these specials. I find them very, very depressing. The show was fascinating, enlightening and damn depressing. In a nutshell, Whites used various methods from the end of reconstruction to 1940 to re-enslave Blacks. Now, I paid attention in high school and college. I don’t remember one lecture on this stuff. I knew that during reconstruction there were several Blacks who were voted into Congress from the deep south. Many Blacks opened businesses and bought land. Then something happened. It all vanished. Basically, a series of laws and statues were passed that said in essense – if you are Black, you ain’t got nothing. Tons of laws were passed that criminalized things that you and I would not think of as crimes – playing dice, walking on railroad tracks, the inability to prove that you are employed at any given moment. Once you were arrested, fines were thrown at you. If you couldn’t pay the fine, you had go to jail. The city or state would then rent your services to local businesses. You became cheap labor, cheap and expendable labor. The Master didn’t own you like in the past. Now, you could be shot by your boss. You were buried and your former boss would go and get another loaner (slave) from the state. Peonage. What the Hell? I had to go look that up. I have never heard the word peonage (the use of laborers bound in servitude because of debt). Cheap Black labor became the engine that pulled the deep south of poverty. At the end of the Civil War, there were four million poor Blacks and four million poor Whites in the south. By 1940, there were eight million Whites living in the middle class and millions of Black Americans were simply out of luck. They didn’t even get a little taste of prosperity for their hard work. I highly recommend Slavery by Another Name, but you might want to take a little something to help steady your nerves before watching. It is a very powerful program. I’m reading the book now. So, you might note that my mood is a little testy!
After reading this, it made me wonder about the Civil War — that conditions for most of the oppressed in the South (and many parts of the North too) did not improve, and this sort of setup pervaded and intensified all the way up to WWII, when faced with the hypocrisy of battling the Nazis, it was exposed how we were treating a minority here as “less than human” also, if not herding and killing, still condemning all those to injustice.
I too was stunned by this show when it aired; I knew about peonage but had no idea of the extent it was used. The show makes the case, ably, that the peonage system was even worse than slavery. Able-bodied black men would be “disappeared”–kidnapped and sentenced to prison under false charges–and their families would never know what happened to them. “Another man done gone.” These men were worked to death, starved to death, and shot if they tried to escape. Because they were totally expendable, their lives had absolutely no value to their “boss,” whereas a slaveholder had at a minimum an economic investment in his slaves.
This gives a new context for why the “Great Migration” of blacks from the South to the North during World War I was so necessary. It also helps explain why the union movement never took hold in the South; employers could work black men to death for free. I think the comparison Naum makes to Hitler’s slave labor camps is absolutely apt. These men were definitely rounded up and worked to death because of their race.
I think u r exactly right.
Thanks for your comments
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