Doug, Welcome to the Lake.

Tom, Thank you for Hosting today’s Book Salon.

Thanks everyone for joining this Salon. I’m looking forward to a lively discussion this afternoon with Douglas Blackmon.

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Thanks for having me.

One of the questions that struck me as soon as I started reading Slavery by Another Name was why it is that the history of convict leasing has been forgotten (at least until this book was published)?

The history wasn’t completely forgotten, and I have to be certain to give credit to scholars such as Pete Daniel, who in the 1960s wrote a dissertation and then published a book examining peonage and some of these practices. Others such as Mary Ellen Curtin have written more recently and with great scholarship about other aspects. But what was missing was a wider comprehension of the width and breadth of forced labor all over the South, and over such a long period of time. And that it was just “prison labor” but how the threat of this kind of involuntary servitude was used as a weapon to intimidate thousands and thousands of other African-Americans into coerced situations like sharecropping.

And, for those joining us, it would be interesting to get a sense of what drew you to this project–especially to the gargantuan task of slogging to county courthouses and state archives all over the South. It’s a task that’s not for the feint of heart!

Good afternoon and welcome to FDL Tom and Douglas.

Douglas, I have not had a chance to read your book but what was the genesis of it?

And the prison labor is still with us today (think license plates still in some states and the Feds have Federal Prison Industries

I began wrestling with the history of race in America and the South in particular as a little boy. For whatever reason, I was intensely aware even as a child of the profound contradications between all the truth, justice and liberty messages of American history and the reality of the lives of the black people who filled my life in a little town in the Mississippi Delta. I started writing about race when I was in the 7th grade, and in many respects have been writing, digging and expanding on that same thread of inquisition ever since.

It’s true that Pete’s work and Alex Lichtenstein’s book, Twice the Work of Free Labor–among others–have laid out some of the story and quite well too. But what’s really striking to me is what doesn’t make its way from scholarly books into our classrooms or into popular consciousness. The chain gang is a sort of cliche in movies about the South, but as you point out, we never see the systemic nature of the coercion and the breadth of the practice of convict leasing.

The specific genesis of the book was an article I wrote for The Wall Street Journal, where I still work, after I stumbled across a reference to a coal mine in Alabama that continued to use black involuntary laborers in the early 20th century. But as mentioned above, the story is about much more than prison labor. It’s really about how the judicial system was corrupted and perverted to re-oppress African-Americans in that era, and how the existence of a penal slavery became a weapon against all blacks in teh rural South, whether “free” or imprisoned.

Hi Tom; hi Doug — in New York State, up uptil the late 80s or early 90s, state units (whether DOT, SUNY, etc.) were required to buy from Corcraft, the state prison manufacturing unit. They did everything from office furniture to filing cabinets. Now they compete directly with other office furnishings manufacturers.

It is interesting how childhood experiences often drive our research agendas and our intellectual passions. I remember going to the Gulf Coast on a family vacation and seeing a chain gang on the side of highway in Alabama, silhouetted against the red clay. All of the men except the supervisors were black. It was an indelible image.

That’s right about the chain gang (which in fact was viewed as a REFORM of the practices I write about in the book). And pop culture depictions of chain gangs and prison work camps–like Cool Hand Luke or Brother Where Art Thou–invariably minimize the terror and brutality of the system. They also give the false impression that this was something that happened to significant numbers of white people. When in fact, it was overwhelmingly something Afrrican-Americans were forced to endure. And in vast numbers of cases, those individuals had committed no actual crimes.

Mr. Blackmon, Thank you. I am incapable of stating what an honor it is to be able to address you.

On page-four you wrote:

“…–supplied an answer or part of one to a question so unnerving few dared ask it aloud: ‘if not racial inferiority, what explained the inexplicably labored advance of African Americans in US Society in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the ‘1960’s….”

That is I believe still the challenge in 2009, to identify the legacy of legalized white supremacy after the Civil War and its lethal damage on the descendants of the slaves. In overwhelming numbers, Americans whose ancestry is 100% European-American, dont get it. Sgt. Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department just gave a clinic in that kind of ignorance and arrogance.

I consider myself a Xtian, but it’s amazing how the Ten Commandments fly out the window, when there’s a chance to exploit a group whose not 100% European American. I will not hold my breath waiting for mainline Xtian leaders to demand accountability, because you know, “whatever happened to sin?”

Everytime I sit down to read your book, I feel as though I am coming face-to-face with really concentrated, institutionalized malevolence. I find many parts a very difficult read and that’s my problem.

Your work is also unbelieveably timely, because in so many industries crowneism with government has replaced the competition that capitalism is supposed to engender.

OT, the “water torture” you described on page 71 of the paper back edition sounded like water-boarding.

Please feel free to ignore, but if you feel free to comment, have you received any communication from Harper Lee?

I doubt historians will rank SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but imho, it deserves to be considered as that kind of achievement.

the use of prison labor, and privatization of prisons, have as several readers note, persisted. And there are many serious questions to raise about aspects of a commercialized penal system, and about disparities in sentencing, etc., which appear to still result in unfair treatment of AFrican-Americans. But having said that, nothing in the current penal practices of the U.S. compares to craven mistreatment and miscarriages of justice that were occurring in the early 20th century.

The chain gang is a sort of cliche in movies about the South,…

Could this be an instance where some great movies have actually worked to the detriment of reality? Because people saw Paul Newman and George Kennedy in Cool Hand Luke of Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones they thought the movie portrayals were truer to life than they actually were?

Doug, welcome to FDL!

I’m only about a third of the way through the book, but it is fascinating. (Disturbing and frightening, too, but that’s another issue.)

In the book, you describe how these slaves were used to break strikes when regular free workers tried to organize labor unions. Right now, I’m wondering about the link between the old culture of “industrial slavery” (as you call it) and the contemporary aversion to labor unions in much of the South.

It seems to me that by demonizing unions, government and business leaders are continuing the same “gotta watch out for/punish troublemakers” mythology that was at the center of the industrial slavery system you describe.

When you consider the incestuous relationship of the police/sheriffs, the courts, and business interests, especially in the era of the events of this book, the connection seems even closer.

Thank you BooRadley. You’re probably too generous, but I’m very pleased you found my book to be enlightening. These are extraoridnarily difficult issues. And for the church, they are complicated (or perhaps elevated in importance) by the overt complicity of the church in slavery before and after the Civil War–and the era of segregation.

There was definitely a connection between the South’s foundational bias against organized labor of any kind and it’s preference for involuntary servitude and slavery. As I write about in the book, the white South (from which I descend) was *incapable* or resurrecting the southern economy without access to millions of coerced laborers. This is not an environment that would be welcoming to the concepts of labor organizing…

Peterr’s question is a really good one. The South has a long history of tangling together racism and anti-unionism–a reminder that practices like convict leasing or Jim Crow weren’t just the result of white supremacist thinking, they also proved to be enormously profitable. The whole Southern economy, from plantation slavery on forward, depended on the exploitation of unfree or semi-free labor.

Were penal systems – and penalties – in the South so much different than in the North? Was part of the issue that penalties in the South were so much more based on physical abuse, coercion, and manual labor than they were in the North? That, coupled with the greater tendency toward arresting Blacks, charging them with greater crimes, and courts exacting greater penalties from Blacks for those crimes, might be part of the answer.

Great job bringing this to light. I think it is also important to highlight the coercive nature of the share cropping system, instituted in the aftermath of reconstruction, which trapped most blacks in the South, and the coercive use of the KKK and similar means to maintain it. what you are describing is just one more part of a horribly coercive labor system which was designed to maintain the profitability of the planter class at the expense of African Americans.

Indeed.

Your book gives another layer of meaning to the phrase “peculiar institution.”

[A techical note for you and other newcomers to FDL: If you hit the “reply” button underneath and to the right of the comment to which you are replying, the system will attach that nice little “In response to . . .” message, which makes the conversation flow a little more smoothly.]

That’s exactly right. And one of the great gaps in conventional history’s examination of antebellum slavery is the rise during the 1850s of “industrial slavery”–which had been largely unknown until the last decade before the civil war. But during that time, southern industrialists in many areas for the first time attempted to use slaves in mines, sawmills, foundries, and other early industrial enterprises. Contrary to racist assumptions that black slaves were incapable of this work, the African-American laborers of course demonstrated the same extraordinary capacities of white laborers. That new kind of slavery–which was far more brutal than agricultural slavery in almost all respects–was incredibly profitable. The men who were dooing that before the Civil War were anxious to find new ways of doing the same thing after the war–and they succeeded.

As the descendant of a long line of hillbillies and rednecks, I think that the Southern economy and society has always had a quasi-feudal character, similar to much of Latin America.

There’s a new essay by Heather Thompson, a historian at Temple University, who is writing a book about the Attica prison uprising, that argues that there were a lot of similarities between the prison systems, coercion and violence–both North and South. But the biggest difference, especially in the period that Douglas covers in his book, was that the Southern system was racialized at its core–and involved efforts to essentially steal free blacks back into slavery. That wasn’t the case North of the Mason-Dixon line.

Penal systems north and south were very different in this time. Most southern states had no meaningful state penitentiary at the end of the 19th century–which was the period when the whole concept of prisons as places of reform (as opposed to simply punishment) was taking hold in the north. The South’s system remained one in which floggings and physical torture were routine and endemic until nearly World War II. And the explicit disparate mistreatment of blacks was acute in the South.

From page 7 of the paperback edition: “…Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime…”

Your description of Plessy v. Ferguson seems a propos here:

Plessy v. Ferguson legitimized the contemptuous attitudes of whites like the top executives of Sloss-Sheffield. Moreover, it certified that any charade of equal treatment for African Americans was not just acceptable and practical at the dawn of the twentieth century, but morally and legally legitimate in the highest venue of white society.

There’s lots more (see pp. 110ff), but Plessy became a huge fig leaf for those “new ways of doing the same thing after the war.”

As I was reading Slavery by Another Name, I was reminded of the discussion about the Nazis and their use of concentration camp inmates as cheap labor (many of whom were dispatched to work in private sector companies–like steel and auto manufacturers), the German equivalents of Sloss-Sheffield and Walter Industries. Have you thought about the comparisons and the different political responses to these two comparable systems of enslaved labor?

Exactly, and the degree to which Plessy v. Ferguson was about so much more than “segregation” per se, has been terribly misunderstood. It was actually a broad social endorsement of the wholesale abandonment by whites in the South–and the North–of the great moral victory of the Civil War. It unleashed a tsunami on black life, from which the country has yet to fully recover.

I make some references in the book to the comparison between German and American approaches to these issues–though one must also be extraordinarily sensitive about “comparing” vast social crimes like the Holocaust and the four centuries of enslavement of blacks in the U.S. But one thing is certain, many Americans shared a hauntingly similar indifference to the value of all human life as that exhibited in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. And in the decades since the Holocaust and since the Civil Rights Movement, our societies have processed the past in radically different ways. In the U.S., it has largely been a broad denial that any of this era is of relevance to individual Americans today.

I agree with you entirely. Comparisons are difficult and fraught with the possibility of misunderstanding. But I’m struck at the widespread indifference, especially among white Americans, to the tragedies of slavery, convict leasing, and racial inequality. We’re much more likely to celebrate the heroic events in our past than to ponder over the deep moral and political questions that the more troubling events raise.

They are also willfully ignorant and indifferent to the ongoing effects of these institutions, as well as others such as redlining, in creating and perpetuating racial difference. It is one of the hardest things to get across in my race and ethnicity class.

One of the frustrations in all this is that being honest about the terrible aspects of the past doesn’t mean we have to ignore the heroic elements of it. It’s okay for me to be aware of and astonished by the lives and heroism and sacrifice of my forebears who enlisted in the Alabama 47th infantry and fought all the way to Lee’s surrender. But I’m obligated as an honest man and an American of good faith and current sensibilities to recognize that my g-g-g-g-g-father was misguided and wrong about what he was fighting for, that his bravery was expended in an ultimately traitorous enterprise, and that if he had succeeded, our country would have followed a horrifying path. Those truths can co-exist, and they have to if we hope to fully understand ourselves as a nation.

Certainly the economic consequences of all this are undeniable. The fact that there are, as I am certain, thousands and thousands of African-Americans still alive today who were born in the 1930s and 1940s and even 1950s into a state of de facto slavery on farms in the South forces us to fundamentally reassess our understanding of the current distribution of wealth in America. It resets the clock on our understanding of how long African AMericans have truly been free and when true economic opportunity was first afforded them.

For lack of a better term, the sunken graves on US Steel property (that you wrote about on pages 3,4,) the last resting place of workers such as Green Cottenham, has there been any attempt to demark those as massacre burial sites?

OT, in terms of DNA and forensics, has anyone looked into exhuming the bodies? IIRC forensic physicians were able to do a lot with the much older remains of Napoleon’s soldiers retreating from Russia in terms of assessing their poor physical condition (and the burdens they had to carry) at the time of their death.

This idea is fraught with danger, but has any group inquired about a DNA bank that might eventually lead to reparations paid to a closest surviving relative of the DNA found in a sunken grave?

There has been some discussion of at least trying to identify some of these mass burial fields. Most of them could never be found unless a researcher such as me, and in some cases probably only me, was guiding them there. That’s a real shame in my view.
DNA research would be a remarkable thing. Much would depend obviously on the conditions of the remains and there are other enormous complexities.

Mr. Blackmon, your book is an extremely powerful work particularly (I think) for white southerners like myself.

I have read in a couple of places that this system of contract prison labor that evolved into the operations in Alabama and Georgia which you describe in great detail actually originated in Louisiana. I have not been able to identify when this system came into being here.

Could you tell me?

A very important point. In 2003, the Census Bureau found that the median household wealth of African Americans is only ten percent that of whites. This is one of the most enduring legacies of blacks’ second-class status, whether as convicts or as victims of redlining. It’s a shocking statistic.

I don’t think it necessarily originated in Louisiana. All the southern states adopted these practices in one form or another. And in several of the Deep South states like, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, variations of this were happening within just a few years of the end of the Civil War, even when federal troops remained in the South. Moreover, there is no one version of this, or a template that was applied in many locations. Whites everywhere in the rural south attempted some version of this simply as soon as they could.

Indeed and the effects are cumulative as there was no opportunity for African American households to accrue wealth (in the form of houses and property) or to pass it on to the next generation, in many cases until the 1960s. That is a very different situation from my own working class and hillbilly ancestors who had something to pass on and enabled my parent’s escape from that poverty.

It has always been my strong conviction that pre-Civil War, the fledgling northern industries were happy to accept payment that they knew damn well came from unpaid efforts of slaves. I think the level of responsibility is more equal on both sides of the Mason Dixon line than most would like to admit. The South just got stuck doing the dirty work. As the descendants of the slaves migrated north, Ku Klux Klan had no problem finding robust strongholds as far north as Indiana.

As you alluded above in your general comment about religion, Pope Pius IX was officially neutral in the Civil War. Privately, he desperately wanted the Confederacy to prevail, because slavery made possible those huge donations from plantation owners to the Vatican.

After reading the first section on the changes in southern life in the immediate aftermath of the civil war — the economic depression, the complete upending of the political and social order, etc. — I thought about parallels to the ongoing fights in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. In the midst of economic, political and social chaos, forces that promise order and stability can and will be very attractive, no matter what other costs will be assessed.

Forensic anthropology (some of my colleagues are practitioners) can accomplish a great deal and with remains of such recent advent there are definite possibilities. Soil conditions in much of the South, however, are a limiting factor.

I’m sure you’ve gotten this question at nearly every book talk you’ve attended. Your book has real implications for the debate about reparations. You touch on the issue briefly in the last pages of the book, but I’d like you to elaborate a bit. It must be in the mind of many of your readers.

You make an important point. I call it cultural compounding interest. Like you, I am the clear beneficiary of how my white grandparents, though they never ammassed any significant wealth, nonetheless had access beginning in the 1940s to better paying jobs, better schools for their children, better roads on which to transport the milk and eggs produced on the farm, loans from banks, help from government officials, and so many other things that were simply prohibited to the black family that lived at the other end of the same piece of property in Jackson Parish Louisiana. My birth in the middle class is directly the result of the fact that my grandparents were able to lift themselves out of abject poverty to the level of upper-lower income by the time my mother started high school–and that the paper mill where my grandfather worked started giving scholarships to the children of the white-only work force. The family 200 yards away had no access to that, and the current economic conditions of it’s descendants reflect that.

Most of the early slave traders, before the ban on importation of slaves, were New Englanders.

Addenda: And the rise of the northern mills was dependent on access to cheap Southern cotton.

There’s an interesting new book by Robert Mickey, a political science professor at the University of Michigan, who describes the South in the mid-twentieth century as undergoing a “transition to democracy” that is, in many respects, comparable to what has happened in other parts of the world. (Mickey himself worked on issues in the Balkans in the mid-1990s). To a great extent, Reconstruction was a great experiment in democratizing the South that was eventually thwarted for several generations.

I think I make an oblique reference to that in the epilogue–of the inherent and extraordinary difficulty of imposing a new morality on a defeated people.

Thank you.

I’m from Wisconsin, so I feel “entitled” to hold the North fully responsible.

Yes, and as the wonderful exhibit on slavery in New York at the NY Historical Society showed us, the Big Apple’s rise to prosperity was the consequence of slaveholding there and, over time, the city’s financial and mercantile ties to the South and Caribbean.

You’re right about Reconstruction, which was in fact the first effort by any human society to integrate a racially identifiable slave minority into instant full citizenship. And it was in fact an astonishingly difficult thing to do, which had never been previously attempted. So it’s not completely shocking that it failed. But what is shocking is that northern whites so readily abandoned the moral force given them by the victory of the Civil War. it’s no accident that the most ruthless oppression of blacks in the South coincided with the passing of the last generation of Union veterans from core leadership in American life.

I heard Jackie Robinson’s teammate, Buck O’Neil (RIP) talk about Florida high schools in the 1920’s. IIRC, there were only four in the entire state that would admit students of both genders who were not 100% European American.

I would agree with that assessment, though I think it is important to recognize the effects of the economic devastation of the South in the aftermath of the war on maintaining and even expanding the semi-feudal character of the region. I think many of the cultural and political peculiarities of the South, which we often comment on here, are an outgrowth of this.

Right. And Bristol, Rhode Island was one of the most important slave importation centers. And virtually every major U.S. was involved in financing, insuring, loaning against, etc etc. the slave business. But the regional “responsibilities” are NOT what any of us should focus on, in my view. My larges point is that enslavement of African-Americans both before and after the Civil War was a bedrock of the U.S. economy, in every region, and every American of any color alive today is in some way, visibly or invisibly, affected by that reality. If we honestly wish to understand the country as it exists today, we have to confront that reality of the past and comprehend it.

I really think this is further evidence that anti-slavery sentiment was not as extensive in the North as many would believe and that even among those opposed to the institution, many were virulent racists (which is how Liberia came into existence). Most of the early scientific racists were in the north at places like Harvard (Samuel Morton for instance).

I’ll look for it when I get to the end.

*grin*

I have faith in you. Press on!

Exactly and we all have a responsibility to address and correct these problems. Another very hard lesson in my class.

Absolutely. This was a point that Martin Luther King, Jr. made so eloquently when he argued that “the racial issue we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

And in every place is an inheritance of the past. That these issues exist or existed in the past is not an indictment of any living person. The test is of how we respond to learning of our past.

OfT, but perhaps somewhat relevant, because of the symbolic value, the faculty and deans at state monopoly schools in (what used to be called BCS conferences) have caved into the cash associated with the “Football Bowl Series.”

It used to be that the coaches had to beg faculty to keep a player “eligible” for the season. Now the jewels of our state public educational systems admit a high percentage of football and basketball players who have no chance of graduating or even accumulating marketable skills. Since the NCAA is on the gravy train, it’s a race to the bottom, who will take the least qualified? The faculty somehow manage to keep them eligible for four and five years only to spit them out after they use up their eligibility, because of course no one will sully the institution’s reputation, by actually conferring a degree.

The numbers aren’t significant, but it’s particularly galling to see acamedicians commit this kind of fraud.

This isn’t exactly what you’re describing BooRadley, but I’ve been impressed since the book came out at how many people raise with me the idea that the professional sports system in the U.S. (including the collegiate part) has aspects of slavery to it. I don’t exactly agree with that sweeping assessment, but it’s fascinating to me that so many people, almost always African-Americans, view it that way.

On the topic of the role of the North may I recommend Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, Jenifer Frank.

Question for you: has anyone pitched to you the idea of bringing the content of your book to the screen as a documentary for film or television?

When I was in graduate school at the University of Oklahoma, only a small percentage of the football players ever graduated and even among those who did many were functionally illiterate.

A PBS documentary production based on the book is in full production. We’ll begin shooting the film early next year and hopefully it will air in late 2010 or early 2011. Title will be “Slavey by Another Name”

Excellent. This will be a great teaching resource.

Hopefully my second book, as yet untitled, will appear around the same time. It’s a memoir of the little town in Mississippi where I grew up, and the vestiges of the system described in Slavery by Another Name.

Even more striking to me as a legacy of the system of neo-slavery (and one of the biggest gaps between black and white opinion) is trust of law enforcement officials, whether police, prison wardens, or guards. That’s one of the major legacies, I think, of the corruption that characterized the southern criminal justice system that Slavery By Another Name describes.

I have not read your book, Mr. Blackmon, but I will. It sounds like an important landmark in U.S. history and proposes profound questions for our society today. I studied American history under Kenneth Stamp and Leon Litwak at Berkeley, and have a fine sense for the untold story. Much thanks for doing the Book Salon, and great success on your work.

Do your know, Doug, whether Du Bois noticed or wrote on the prison slavery issue?

Thanks, Tom, for hosting this, and to the commentators for a stimulating discussion.

Great! I now have another film for my class. 8-)

You were fortunate to study under such giants. Litwack is a towering figure.
Du Bois is a critical character–both as an actor and as a witness–in my book. He devoted an important section of the Souls of Black Folk, in 1903, to description of a trip across south Georgia and the explicit slavery he witnessed everywhere. In 1906, at the behest of the federal commissioner of labor, he performed an exhaustive study of farm labor conditions in Lowndes County, Alabama, where the vast majority of the black population of 30,000 lived in defacto enslavement by the 6,000 whites. The report Du Bois wrote was so alarming that the commissioner of labor ordered it destroyed. No copies survive. Instead, Du Bois used his time in Lowndes as the basis for his novel, Quest for the Silver Fleece, which is a vivid rendering of the terror that was then falling across black life.

We’ve got a little time left, so I want to follow up on my previous question and ask it a little differently. In the last few years, we’ve heard a lot of apologies for slavery from corporations, governments, and universities. (Wachovia makes a cameo appearance in Slavery By Another Name). What do you think of apologies–and of more assertive demands for something more, like reparations. (I have my own opinion on both, but would rather hear yours, especially after spending a lot of time on the road talking about your book).

I thought global capitalism is the new slavery…

My view is that apologies are in fact meaningful and powerful for many people, especially if they are done in a way that others find credible and meaningful.
Reparations, as they have been most discussed over the past decade, are extraordinarily difficult. Under our current legal system, there are insuperable obstacles to compelling damages for injuries that are this distant in the past (in the case of antebellum slavery) or when the direct victims are long dead. Moreover, no one has yet offered that I am aware a compelling answer to the questions of how to identify who should recieve reparations (a white person with black ancestry for instance) and many other thorny legalities.
So my belief is that that sort of straight forward reparations for what happened is probalby impossible.
On the other hand, what is entirely possible–and has a proven track record over the past 30 years–are remedies such as affirmative action, targeted education spending, etc etc. Those sorts of efforts have helped profoundly change the face of American life, at astonishingly little cost to society or to any individual whites.

At the risk of being somewhat crass, this sounds like an interesting project to work on, too interesting to pass up. How can I contact the production company?

notmickey@gmail.com

I am a little more skeptical about apologies, but I agree with you on reparations (they make sense in principle, especially if they are defined precisely) but they are full of political landmines. You are so right on targeted policies. For all of the heat that they generate in public debate, their costs are very low and their benefits demonstrable.

Wonderful!

Thanks for coming today to chat about your book. I have enjoyed what I’ve read thus far, and am intrigued to see what lies ahead.

So . . . having won a Pulitzer for this book, what do you have in the works for an encore?

I think that programs like scholarships, training programs, and the like targeted at African Americans, or others similarly damaged like Native Americans, are a reasonable remedy, though the current Supreme Court makes them unlikely to pass legal muster.

As we come to the end of this remarkable Book Salon,

Doug, Thank you for stopping by the Lake, for writing this book, and for spending the afternoon discussing your new book and the continuation of slavery in America after the Civil War. Also, congratulations on the Pulitzer Prize.

Tom, Thank you very much for Hosting this great Book Salon.

Everyone, this is an important book, if you haven’t bought one yet, here is a link.

Thanks all.

Recent court decisions have definitely narrowed the options available for remedying past and ongoing discrimination. And state referenda have been very effective in limiting affirmative action, especially in public higher education.

In some ways, one of the most remarkable aspects of the American discourse on race is how little African-Americans have asked for, compared to how much was taken from them or done to them. Contrary to many simplistic views, a group of people who had every right to make enormous demands on American society asked only that the authentic engines of economic opportunity in the U.S. and political representation be granted to them–100 years after being promised. Affirmative Action and a few incredibly inexpensive targeted edcucational and social programs have been the only concrete costs to the larger society. But the benefits in return have been greater than perhaps any society in human history. It’s no accident in my view that the period of greatest ecnomic expansion in U.S. history occurred AFTER all U.S. citizens finally achieved some level of authentic freedom and opportunity. We are crazy if we thoughtlessly backslide on this.

I want to close by thanking Douglas Blackmon for writing his superb book. I’m looking forward to his next one–and to the PBS documentary. Thanks too for the stimulating discussion.

There are far too many powerful people and interests who have a stake in keeping the situation the way it is.

Amen.

Thanks for having me. It’s been a great conversation.
Best regards to you all

Marketing stuff that is worth what you pay for it. I hope Random House tries to market this to high schools and colleges. Economics professors, history, theology, philosohy (ethcis) it’s extremely relevant.

I didn’t hear about your work, or the book, or the Pulitzer, until I saw the book salon here at FDL. Unions should be buying it for their locals.

OT, I HATE playing the identity card, but SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME certainly warrants it. Keith Olbermann was a huge fan of Buck O’Neil. Both he and Rachel Maddow frequently have as a guest, a Princeton Poly Sci professor, Melissa Harris-Lacewell. Because she’s attractive and only about 90% European American, she is permitted to speak about ethnic issues. If someone from Random House called her, she might be helpful in getting you on???

As you know, because you are 100% European American, you have LEVERAGE that so many others do not.

Thank you again.

Indeed. The reality is that all of us benefit in a myriad of ways from these programs, including increased economic productivity, lowered crime, and fewer social problems. Unfortunately, too many people cannot see past their own narrow, immediate self interest.

Thanks for the reply. I’ve ordered your book and am excited to read it. I hadn’t known about the Lowndes affair.

Stampp and Litwak helped me learn to think critically, teaching more than U.S. history thereby. I was lucky, but unfortunately too young at the time to fully appreciate it. (I think I had Stampp as prof at end of his career. He died only recently, but when I took his class around 79, he was already in his late 60s.)

While I do not think I can use the whole book in my classes, I am certainly looking at using excerpts and will now order it for myself.

This is OT but not really,
I have come to the conclusion that Massachusetts has been targeted for, at least, the last eight years to criminalize our young men. Police brutality and trumping up of charges has frightened ALL parents: black, Asian, Arab and white.
Our mistake?
Kennedy,
Frank,
Markey,
Kerry

Our kids have paid dearly.
And we have begun to mobilize.

And Deval Patrick didn’t help:)

I understand the well thought out positions on reparations.

FWIW, Xtianity has a lot say about making restitution. If there isn’t restitution, (at least partial or at least the attempt) there isn’t forgiveness.

Today, just one example, Big Pharma routinely pays Medical doctors to pretend to be authors of studies/articles they didn’t write. The studies almost unanimously are written against the public health, but in favor of the corporation’s profit. One of the many great things about SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME is that it puts faces and names to the oppressors/murders. Those people have descendants and that may have a quality of deterrence???

“One of the many great things about SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME is that it puts faces and names to the oppressors/murders”

SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME aka “Corporate Servitude,” a sequel! How corporations leverage government, the American people and manipulate the rule of law to ensure profit, at life’s expense.

WRT reparations, corporations have always fought for their legal right as ”persons.” It’s the cornerstone of their right to bribe/contribute to political campaigns. In this context, it’s that ”personhood,” that might injure their position to say that they are no longer responsible for their corporate ancestors.