Slavery By Another Name Summary
As stated above the convict leasing system started in Alabama. Alabama started the convict leasing system almost twenty years before the rest of the southern states, beginning in 1846, and throughout the time Alabama continually had the harshest conditions. In 1883 almost forty years after the start of convict leasing in Alabama ten percent of Alabama’s total revenue was derived from convict leasing. Then in 1893 seventy-three percent of Alabama’s total revenue came from the convict leasing system. The death rates of this time for leased convicts was nearly ten times higher than convicts in the northern non-lease states. An example of this is in 1873 when twenty-five percent of all black leased convicts died.
Under the system of convict leasing …show more content…
Blackmon’s book is the book that scholars point to when talking about the subject. The New York Times says, “Blackmon's way of organizing this material is to bookend his legal and historical chronicle with the personal story of Green Cottenham, a black man born free in the mid-1880s. This gets "Slavery by Another Name" off to a shaky start, if only because many of Blackmon's wordings are speculative. The book underscores that if black Americans' enslavement to U.S. Steel (which, when it acquired the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, became a prime offender) is analogous to the slavery that occurred in Nazi Germany, it also emphasizes that the American slaves' illiteracy meant there would be no written records of their experience. So imagining Green's experience becomes something of a stretch.
But as soon as it gets to more verifiable material, "Slavery by Another Name" becomes relentless and fascinating. It exposes what has been a mostly unexplored aspect of American history (though there have been dissertations and a few books from academic presses). It creates a broad racial, economic, cultural and political backdrop for events that have haunted Blackmon and will now haunt us all. And it need not exaggerate the hellish details of intense racial
Under the system of convict leasing …show more content…
Blackmon’s book is the book that scholars point to when talking about the subject. The New York Times says, “Blackmon's way of organizing this material is to bookend his legal and historical chronicle with the personal story of Green Cottenham, a black man born free in the mid-1880s. This gets "Slavery by Another Name" off to a shaky start, if only because many of Blackmon's wordings are speculative. The book underscores that if black Americans' enslavement to U.S. Steel (which, when it acquired the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, became a prime offender) is analogous to the slavery that occurred in Nazi Germany, it also emphasizes that the American slaves' illiteracy meant there would be no written records of their experience. So imagining Green's experience becomes something of a stretch.
But as soon as it gets to more verifiable material, "Slavery by Another Name" becomes relentless and fascinating. It exposes what has been a mostly unexplored aspect of American history (though there have been dissertations and a few books from academic presses). It creates a broad racial, economic, cultural and political backdrop for events that have haunted Blackmon and will now haunt us all. And it need not exaggerate the hellish details of intense racial