Slavery by Another Name
by Douglas A. Blackmon
Summary
Douglas A. Blackmon argues that slavery in the United States did not end with the Civil War but persisted, in a different legal form, well into the twentieth century. He builds that argument around Green Cottenham, a Black man arrested in Alabama in 1908 on a vagrancy charge, fined more than he could pay, and then leased to a US Steel subsidiary's coal mines to work off the debt, a fate Blackmon traces as far as the incomplete county and company records allow. Cottenham's story stands in for tens of thousands of others swept up by the same system across the South: laws written to criminalize ordinary Black life, from walking beside a railroad to changing employers without permission, followed by fines no one could pay and sentences served as forced, unpaid labor for private companies.
Blackmon documents how this convict leasing system worked alongside sharecropping and debt peonage to keep the postwar South's economy running on coerced Black labor, and he shows how local sheriffs, judges and companies profited together from a pipeline of arrests that had almost nothing to do with actual crime. The book follows this machinery from Reconstruction through the buildup to the Second World War, when federal pressure and wartime labor needs finally forced its formal end, though its economic and social effects lasted far longer.
Blackmon does not primarily argue for reparations; he calls instead for the history itself to be taught and acknowledged, since so much of it had been allowed to disappear from public memory. Reading the book means following one family's traceable fragments outward into a national system built to erase exactly that kind of record, and it suits a reader who assumed slavery in America ended in 1865 and wants to understand precisely how it did not.
Historical Context & Significance
The Pulitzer board gave Douglas A. Blackmon the 2009 Prize for General Nonfiction for Slavery by Another Name, published in 2008 by Doubleday. The finalists that year were Arthur Herman's Gandhi and Churchill and William I. Hitchcock's The Bitter Road to Freedom, on the liberation of Europe. The New York Times called the book's evidence relentless and fascinating, and Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald called it an astonishing book that would change a reader's understanding of what Americans were.
PBS adapted the book into a ninety minute documentary in 2012, directed by Sam Pollard and narrated by Laurence Fishburne, which brought Blackmon's research to a much wider audience than the book alone reached. Blackmon, a Wall Street Journal reporter before the book's publication, drew on court records, corporate archives and county documents that historians had largely overlooked, and Slavery by Another Name is now widely cited in later scholarship and journalism on convict leasing and the long economic afterlife of slavery in the American South.