Published: February 10, 2010 07:25 pm      

Pulitzer author speaks at Dalton State

Blackmon says slavery continued after the Civil War in other forms

Forced labor in the American South didn’t entirely end after the Civil War, Pulitzer prize-winning author Douglas A. Blackmon told an audience at Dalton State College on Tuesday.

Blackmon, author of “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” said that from the 1880s to the early 1940s, “several hundred thousand” people were sent to forced labor camps after being arrested mostly on trumped up charges. At least 75 percent of prisoners sentenced to labor were black, he said, and most of the laws that landed them in those prison camps were laws that targeted blacks or were applied almost exclusively to them.

They were arrested on charges like vagrancy, Blackmon said, the crime of not being able to prove they were employed at any given time. Many convicts were sentenced to hard labor, and officials with the county jails where they were supposed to serve made deals with private companies that paid the law officers for the “workers,” who served out their sentence doing the companies’ work.

“They more resemble certain death camps in World War II than any commercial operation you can imagine today,” Blackmon said.

The re-enslavement of blacks was an outgrowth of the South’s difficulty in recovering from the crisis of losing an economic system that relied on slavery, he said. The practice died out at least partly because a white forced laborer became a victim of abuse, drawing attention to the issue.

Blackmon is the Atlanta bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. He grew up in Mississippi and was in first grade when schools became integrated. In 2000, he was recognized by the National Association of Black Journalists for his stories revealing secret financial connections in the 1960s between a wealthy white northern supremacist, segregationists in the South and J.P. Morgan & Company. His stories revealing U. S. Steel Corp.’s reliance on forced black laborers in Alabama coal mines during the early 1900s led to him writing “Slavery by Another Name.”

John Hutcheson, vice president of academic affairs at Dalton State, said faculty and students on the Fine Arts and Lecture Series committee selected Blackmon to speak. His appearance coincides with Black History Month and is part of the college’s ongoing efforts to provide education on diversity, Hutcheson said.

Blackmon told stories of black men being forced into coal and iron ore mines — some of which are in Dade and Walker counties — and being whipped sometimes to death when they didn’t meet their quota of between two and six tons of digging per day. It’s important to know the stories so they aren’t repeated, he said.

Freshman nursing student Kelsey Locke, who is white, said she found Blackmon’s tales of legalized physical racial abuse “pretty shocking.”

“It’s just unbelievable, the conditions and stuff that they had to go through,” she said. “... He made me think more about it.”

Patricia Rivers, the 67-year-old black historian for Dalton’s Emery Center, said it’s important for people to know the area’s history. The Emery Center is a black history museum and the site of the former Emery Street School, an all-black campus.

Rivers said she remembers when she could not eat at the Oakwood Cafe or other downtown restaurants because of segregation. She and her husband, Curtis, had to enter the Wink Theatre through an alley door, she said, because regulations allowed only whites to enter through the main door.

“We also experienced a lot of what (Blackmon) was talking about,” she said. “You just wondered why these things were the way they were.”



For more on the author

www.slaverybyanothername.com