I put up a short post yesterday called a Criminal Business.
I made a claim in it that some readers might have found hard to believe. That long after slavery black men were imprisoned and forced to work as virtual slaves. Anyone who has seen the old 1970’s Cicely Tyson movie Sounder got a good cinematic look at the system. They might not have realized what they were seeing.
The prison that Paul Winfield was sent to was part of America’s black version of the Soviet Union’s Gulag Archipeligo.
I tried a feeble attempt to locate the book my comment was based upon in a Google Search but gave up. I knew I’d purchased the book a couple years ago for another book project I have in mind. I couldn’t remember its name and I didn’t have time to wade through a basement covered in painter’s tarps and equipment to locate it. I have’t yet read the book or about sixty others on black history that I’ve also acquired to do my research but I’d been very impressed with the review I had read of it.
By a remarkable coincidence I was taking the night off watching the stream of news programs on PBS when I got to Almanac. Tonight it included a segment on a 90 minute program being run next Monday night across the nation based on the very same book Slavery by Another Name.
I hopped up off the couch (the basement painting having been finished last night) and ran to the book cases behind the sofa which contained the book. With the title in my head I retrieved it to help me complete this post. The book is by a Wall Street Journal reporter, Doug Blackmon, who hails from Atlanta, Georgia. He’s white if you were wondering.
For those of you who feel that the age of racism is over now that we’re busy trying to rid ourselves of the Muslim, foreign, Communist, America hating Barack Obama let me give you a little history that might have escaped Newt Gingrich’s notice.
A. For two hundred years blacks in America were mostly slaves.
B. After the Civil War there was a period of one decade where Union troops tried to keep Ku Klux Klansman from burning down the new black schools and lynching ambitious black men.
C. By the end of that decade Southern whites had regained control of their states and passed the “black codes” which denied black people just about every right imaginable.
D. By the time the “State’s Rights” movement in the South had reduced most southern blacks to land tenancy (serfdom) the Supreme Court recognized the right of these states to do this in the 1996 Supreme Court “Separate but Equal” decision of Plessy vs. Fergusson.
E. “Lynch law” was supreme in the South for the next seventy years until about 1967 despite World Wars I and II which saw some black men serve as something other than porters for the regular troops. Lynch Law prevailed for an additional twenty years after the war to make sure returned black soldiers hadn’t gotten the wrong idea about their status.
F. From the time of the black codes – 1876 until World War II – a vast population of black men were forced to work for literally no compensation either as tenant farmers or as prisoners working for private companies often until they died and were buried in unmarked graves as paupers – as in the documentary which will air next Monday night.
G. In 1965 Lyndon Johnson got the Voting Rights Act passed which by law guaranteed all blacks the right to vote even in states like Mississippi that had managed to prevent 40% of its populaton (all black) from voting.
H. When the Federal courts began forcing the South to abide by the law southern whites retaliated against the Democratic party by joining the once hated Party of Lincoln in droves.
I. The influence of the South has been the principle reason all 50 states have maintained a legal system that has imprisoned close to 50% of all black males which in most cases leads to the loss of their right to vote.
FOR THE RECORD: I’d damned well vote for Barack Hussein Obama even if he was the “Muslim, foreign, Communist, America hating” candidate the Republicans say he is and the GOP nominated Jesus Christ. Fortunately, I won’t have to make that difficult choice since most of the Republican candidates have proven to be little more than different flavors of vomit. Hell, I think candidate Jesus would vote for the Democrat too.
Republicans are better than this. Really they are. I know, because in my heart I’m still a Republican. They just have to be led out of the Wilderness.
