At night, Cottenham was chained up in an overcrowded shack which caused disease among those living there. The company paid off his fine so that he could be forced into the Pratt Mines where he worked long hours extracting coal from the earth every day. Although he was not guilty of committing any crime, the authorities sentenced him to hard labor and sold him to Tennessee Coal & Iron Company (TCI) as part of US Steel.

The book, Slavery by Another Name, opens with a story about Green Cottenham who was arrested for vagrancy in 1908. Whereas other books have focused on just government failure to ensure civil rights, he also targets private business for upholding injustice in the US. He challenges historians who characterize it as an inevitable result of the Civil War by revealing that it was a result of decisions motivated by racist beliefs and greed for financial gain. They couldn’t move around freely or demand better compensation for their work because of this oppressive environment that often included violence and threats from racists like members of the KKK.īlackmon’s book reveals the history of how African-Americans were treated in the US after slavery. The racism was so bad that even sharecroppers (who technically had some freedom) lived under constant oppression in the South. In addition, leaders of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan openly supported suppressing black political power. Even those who wanted blacks to have equal rights with whites saw white people as superior. This system continued until World War II, challenging the usual assumption written in history books that all African Americans were free after the Civil War and showing the full extent of injustice that has been wrought upon former slaves and their descendants.Įven though African Americans were granted citizenship in the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, they were still treated as inferior to whites. The prisoners faced abuse and torture from racist guards and fellow workers, and they were effectively re-enslaved for years on end. They then had to work for white people in order to pay off their debt for being falsely accused of crimes. In the South, black men were arrested on false charges like vagrancy. Written by journalist Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II is a thorough account of how slavery continues in the south despite being outlawed. 1-Page Summary of Slavery By Another Name Overall Summary

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