Debt Bondage- "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil

Last edited Mon Jun 8, 2015, 07:13 PM - Edit history (2)

War to WWII", 2009 Pulitzer prize winning and NYT bestseller book by journalist Douglas A. Blackmon that was made into a PBS documentary in 2012. 'Slavery by Another Name' reveals the terror of forced labor in the South which unjustly imprisoned blacks from the end of the Civil War to the start of WWII.

Prisoners were often picked up and charged for minor offenses and then kept in debt to work for US corporations and commercial interests across cities and states in the South. This shameful new form of slavery was revived just after the Civil War and was enabled by laws designed to intimidate blacks. The system existed until the Second World War.

Tens of thousands of black Americans and some poor whites were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for the costs of their own arrests. With no means to pay the ostensible 'debts', prisoners were sold to work for US corporations and commercial interests in the South.

Held against their will and sold and resold by county sheriffs and govt. officials, the uncompensated work of these laborers brought millions of dollars into local and state government treasuries for 80 years during Jim Crow. Prisoners labored in coal mines, timber camps, brickyards, railroads, quarries and farm plantations. US Steel was one of the corporations involved in this period of neo-slavery.

*READ MORE, 'Slavery by Another Name', 2009, by Douglas A. Blackmon.
http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/the-book/

- The Film by PBS 'Slavery by Another Name' Trailer. The 90 minute PBS documentary can be watched online at YouTube.

The corrupt convict system was the subject of Hollywood films like, 'I was a Fugitive from a Chain Gang', 1932, starring noted actor Paul Muni. Based on a true life story the movie awakened the American public to the hardships of a prisoner who is wrongfully convicted and eventually escapes to Chicago.
'Cool Hand Luke' (1967) set in Florida in the 1950s captured the harsh existence of labor convicts featuring Paul Newman and George Kennedy who gave an Oscar-winning performance. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier starred in the 'The Defiant Ones' (1958), the story of two shackled prisoners in the South who hate each other but manage to escape.

- Official Trailer, 'The Defiant Ones' (1958)