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• About Slavery by Another Name
• "The World War II Effect"

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Tavis: Douglas Blackmon is the Atlanta bureau chief for "The Wall Street Journal" who's written extensively about race and American society. His new book is called "Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II." Douglas, nice to have you on the program.

Douglas A. Blackmon: Thanks for having me.

Tavis: Let me start with the obvious question. What do you mean by re-enslavement?

Blackmon: I mean the return of slavery. It wasn't the same thing as - exactly the same thing as what we all learned about in school about antebellum slavery, but the reality of what happened was that after a time of real freedom for Blacks after the Civil War, a new slavery began to come back, engineered by many people whose economic interests had been built on slavery before the Civil War.

And by the time the 20th century started, there were thousands and thousands of African Americans who had been returned to some kind of slavery and millions of others who lived in fear of it.

Tavis: Let's go back down that timeline. So the dateline that I want to start with, the dateline just after the Civil War, what's the conditions?

Blackmon: Well, immediately after the Civil War, like, we've learned about Reconstruction and we know that Blacks held political power and that Blacks were voting all across the South. But a lot of the story that we learn in school is that that was a bad time, and that government didn't work very well, and that we've also learned a story of that after the Civil War, that freed slaves were somehow unequipped to be free, and that there were rages of crime and waves of misconduct all over the South, and that that was an explanation for why the White South had such a violent response to African Americans.

But the reality is, that's not true. And in the course of writing "Slavery By Another Name," I went back and dug through courthouses after courthouses in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida and found the original arrest records of thousands and thousands of people.

And the truth is that in many places in the South, I would find there were no crimes at all being committed for months and months at a time, and then suddenly there would be 15 or 20 or 30 young Black men rounded up in the span of a few days and then sold under this perversely cynical judicial system that was emerging.

They would then be sold into a form of slavery in coal mines or timber camps or sawmills and turpentining stills, and that happened to thousands and thousands of African American men.

Tavis: But if slavery has ended, then how, because of crime or alleged crime, does one get sold into slavery again?

Blackmon: There are really two things happening. One is that all of the Southern states, because the South was addicted to forced labor. And that's something that you really have to get your head around, is that the economy of the South couldn't operate without coerced labor. And so Whites in the South were insistent on reasserting some sort of control over Black labor all across the region.

And so all of the Southern states passed laws which essentially made it almost impossible for a Black man to be secure from arrest at any given moment. There were laws passed that made it - it was a crime if you couldn't prove you had a job at any given time. It was a crime to change employers without the permission of the first employer. So if you worked for a White man on his farm and you wanted to get a better deal with a different White man down the road, if you tried to do that without the permission from the first man, you could be arrested.

And if you were arrested for these incredibly flimsy crimes, many of which were just fabricated and almost all of which were declared unconstitutional later, a man who was arrested under those circumstances would be fined $10 or $20 but would then also be charged the cost of his arrest. He'd be charged a fee to the sheriff, a fee to the clerk, a fee to the deputy who served the warrant, a fee to the witnesses.

All of those things would add up to $100 or $200 that he would have to pay for his fine. Hardly any indigent Black man in 1900 could do that, and so instead to pay those fines he would be turned over to a private enterprise - a White farmer or a coal mine or a sawmill where the owner was willing to pay those fines in return for a year or two years or five years of labor.

But in the beginning, that might have been a somewhat legitimate system, even though the crimes were largely made up. But what began to happen was that this created a market for young Black men, and soon there were Black men simply being kidnapped off the roadways and sold for $40 or $50, and there was no means or effort to prosecute Whites for doing that.

Tavis: So the court system had no honest way of dealing with this, no way to broker this situation.

Blackmon: The court system was central to it. The court system had been perverted - the Southern court system had been perverted to become a vehicle for exactly this. Now there were exceptions, there were times - in 1903, there was a fairly valiant U.S. attorney in Montgomery, Alabama, who attempted to prosecute some Whites for trafficking in slaves and holding slaves.

But the reality was, it was nearly impossible. No White jury in the South would convict a White man for anything related to this, but also an amazing irony that I discovered while writing the book was that while slavery was unconstitutional by the 13th Amendment, there was no federal statute that actually made it a crime to enslave someone.

And so there were times when a White man would be - there would be an effort made to prosecute him for holding someone under peonage, which is debt slavery, and his defense would be "I wasn't holding him to pay off a debt, I was holding him because I bought him. I owned him." And so they would plead guilty to slavery because there was no law against it.

Tavis: So you basically go from de jure factory to de facto slavery.

Blackmon: Exactly.

Tavis: Right.

Blackmon: And this happened to thousands and thousands of African Americans, right up to the beginning of World War II.

Tavis: Talk to me - you mentioned mining a moment ago, you talk a lot about that in the text, and I was even enlightened about that particular aspect of how they were being used, how they were being enslaved. So when we think of slaves, we think of slaves in the field, picking cotton, etc., etc. But this really started to turn toward mining enslavement. Talk more about the mining industry in the South.

Blackmon: Well, it was mining and a lot of sort of heavy industrial, sort of crude industrial enterprises, like mining goal, mining iron ore, cutting timber, harvesting the sap from pine trees to make turpentine, which was a huge business at that time.

But what was happening there was that at the end of old slavery, just before the Civil War, there had begun to be capitalists in the South who were experimenting with using slaves in factories and coal mines and industrial settings, and those were the men who, after the Civil War, worked the hardest to recreate this new form of forced labor.

And like in the case of the - I talk a lot about a group of mines on the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama. They were owned by U.S. Steel Corp by the time these events occurred, and in those mines, the owners of the mines acquired Black men from county jails all across Alabama. They leased thousands of Black men directly from the state of Alabama.

Over the course of 30 or 40 years, there were tens of thousands of African American men held there. They lived under incredibly brutal conditions, malnourished, sick. They were whipped every day. Unspeakable scenes of brutality.

Tavis: You talk, obviously, in the book, as you do in this conversation, about the South's absolute culpability in this enterprise, this illegal, unethical, immoral enterprise, and you also talk in the book about the North's complicity - the South's culpability, the North's complicity, particularly on the part of major American corporations. Talk to me about that.

Blackmon: Well, there's two faces to that. One is simply that there were big companies in the South and in the North, and some companies that survive today, like U.S. Steel Corp, which relied very heavily on this practice and made enormous amounts of money, as did all of the state governments in the South. Millions and millions of dollars were collected and poured into the treasuries of the state governments of the South.

But the more upsetting or perverse aspect of this is the complicity of Whites in the North more generally. It's really not a surprise, in some respects, that Southern Whites conducted themselves in the way that they did, but what was surprising was that by the end of the 19th century, by about 1900, Whites all across America, including in the North, had reached a new consensus that essentially it was too hard.

That the integrating of freed slaves and their children into American society, it had been going on for 35 years, the political process was being undercut by it, it was a tough thing to do, and America was tired of it. White America was tired of it. And about 1900, Whites in the North began in very large numbers to say, "We've had enough of this, let's let the Whites in the South do whatever they want to with Blacks." And that's when this system began to metastasize on a huge scale.

Tavis: My time with you is so limited in the time that I have, let me ask, because I'm curious about this. You're from Mississippi?

Blackmon: I am.

Tavis: Okay, so you're from there and I'm born in Mississippi, you're born in Mississippi. For a White guy born in Mississippi, in a state that really tries desperately, as you well know, as we both know, to put this past behind - and Mississippi's not the only state, of course. But they tried desperately to put this behind them. I'm curious as to how a White guy like you from Mississippi gets fascinated by this kind of subject matter.

Blackmon: Well, I was born in the fall of 1964, and I grew up in this little town in the Delta, a little cotton town, where in those last years of the 1960s there were a lot of things going on. There was a farm labor strike on a plantation right outside of town, there was a march by Black high school students that was tear gassed by local police, and then I started the first grade in the first class of children in Mississippi where Black and White began school together and went through 12 years together.

So from my earliest years I was perplexed by and fascinated by why it was the way that it was. Why there was all this anger, why there was all this conflict. And I started asking a lot of questions about it even then, and in those days, those questions weren't very welcome, as you can imagine.

But when I became an adult, I started writing about race. In a lot of ways, I've been writing the same story for 25 years and the book is a culmination of that. But what it really all comes down to was I've been obsessed with the question of why are things the way they are today? And these events that happened in the 20th century, not before the Civil War, but these things that happened in the lives of our grandparents and our great-grandparents and even our parents, to some degree, these are the things that explain so much about the Black-White divide in America today, and these are the things that I believe we have to be able to be much more honest about if we're going to understand where we go in the future.

Tavis: Great place to close. Let me ask you, to your latter point about being honest. Let me tell you a quick story. I was on a plane the other day, a few weeks ago, as you'll recall, when "The New York Times" did a major story about you and about this book in "The New York Times."

I'm on a plane; I'm sitting next to an African American. We're both reading "The New York Times," and we pretty much finished the article about you around the same time. At the time, I didn't know that you were going to be a guest on our show. We both read this article on this plane from New York to L.A., and by the time we finished reading we started a conversation about what we'd read in the article about you.

And this gentleman, Black guy, makes the point to me, he says, "I am so glad that Mr. Blackmon has written this book. I'm so glad 'The New York Times' and others now are starting to talk about these issues, but in the time that he's been talking about these issues, I'm sure Mr. Blackmon would concede, Mr. Smiley, that other folk who happen to be Black have raised so many of these same issues in their research, and I wonder," he says to me, "I wonder why it is that when a White guy tells this story, 'The New York Times' and everybody else - I'm glad that he did it."

But he was fascinated by how it is that when a White guy tells the story, all of a sudden it starts to get traction. As the White guy who wrote it, who's getting the traction, what would you have said to that guy sitting next to me on the plane?

Blackmon: Well, I guess two things. One is it's also a White guy from Mississippi who works for what many people think of as the most conservative daily newspaper in the country. And so there is a degree to which that even - and I wrote what started this book was a story that appeared in "The Wall Street Journal" seven years ago.

And there was a lot of the same reaction then. But part of what it was about was there was an idea that, well, this is not somebody who's going to be making this up. It's a White guy at "The Wall Street Journal," and so that's part of it. There is a certain credibility, I guess, that comes from that.

But also, I will tell you the story hasn't been told exactly this way before, and a lot of historical treatment of these issues in the past has sort of missed the point. It's not seeing the forest for the trees. It's been unable to acknowledge that what really happened was a new system of slavery. Not just a bad time for Black people, but a new kind of enslavement of African Americans, and I think that that's something that again, we have to get to the reality of that and we have to account for it somehow.

And I think that's why, I hope, the book resonates.

Tavis: Well, if the brother on the plane is watching, there's your answer. So I asked Mr. Blackmon himself, and there's his answer, and I respect it. More importantly, I'm glad he wrote this book. It needs to be discussed. The book is called "Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II." Mr. Blackmon, thank you for this wonderful text, I appreciate it.

Blackmon: Thank you for having me.

Tavis: Glad to have you on the program.