Slavery did not end with the Civil War

I’m not sure why Michael Days recommended I read the Pulitzer Prize-winning, “Slavery by Another Name,” by Southern journalist Douglas A. Blackmon. It followed a brief discussion about race, which we sometimes had.

Especially when Days was the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, and I was the self-designated Politically Incorrect columnist. 

Days is African American and I hold him in the highest esteem as a journalist and editor, and even more so for the way he conducts his personal life. Since personal is personal, I won’t go into that here, other than to say that he is a gentleman and conducts himself on a high level of compassion, dedication, and love. 

I have often written about race, and talked about racial topics for decades with Black friends, colleagues, and neighbors.

Through my interaction with Black people, and learning through reading, I believe African Americans are at the highest levels of achievement in American history.

Days is himself an example of that. He rose to become the top editor of an important American newspaper, while his wife Angela was a staffer at The New York Times, America’s most influential newspaper.

And yet — even though America has nine Black billionaires — the average Black family lags far behind the average white family in assets.

Why?

To find an answer I walk you into the Way Back Machine, set for 1963, where you find me sitting in a sociology class at Brooklyn College’s night school being conducted by Irv Goldhaber, a rotund man with a graying buzzcut whose day job was associate director of New York’s City Commission on Human Rights. (One good thing about night school was having adjunct professors who taught by night, but who were professionals in their fields during the day.)

Blacks were lagging even worse then, and a palliative was proposed — using affirmative action to give victims of discrimination a leg up, to help level the playing field.

Is this fair? Goldhaber was asked.

His reply went like this:

Let’s say you were going to have a race, but one of the competitors had been kept in a 4-foot box for a month before the race.

Just before the starter’s gun, you allowed him to walk to the starting line.

Would that be a fair race, he asked?

We agreed that it would not be, and we understood the metaphor.

That was 50 years ago, and yet some people use the same metaphor.

I do not.

When it comes to race in America, I tend toward optimism, the person who sees undeniable positive change, while acknowledging racism does have a home in America. To me, the glass is not half full, it is 3/4s full. Up until the time I was in college, much of America was segregated by law.

When the laws are designed to oppress a race, that is systemic racism. America was a racist nation. That is undeniable.

But starting in 1960, with a strong Civil Rights Act (there were earlier, weaker ones), things began to change. It was what would today be called a reckoning.

It was followed by other laws that protected voting rights, desegregated public schools, prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, religion, or national origin, prohibited discrimination in housing, enshrined the right to a fair trial and public education, and more.

Today, the system prohibits actions based on bigotry.

Yet bigotry still exists.

So does bank robbery, despite laws against it.

There will always be law-breakers, but the system opposes boas, which is why politicians, looking at you Joe Biden, ought to delete that term from their lexicon. Not because it is hurtful, but because it is untrue.

Is there any major American city that has not had a Black mayor?

There are Black mayors all across the South, and, more importantly, Black sheriffs.

The sheriffs used to be white, and that brings me back to “Slavery by Another Name.”

The slavery referenced here is debt slavery, or neoslavey, which in some ways was worse than agricultural or household slavery. 

Why?

Under the “old” slavery, the person was bought, for a few hundred dollars or more. It was an investment. The owner needed them to work to amortize the investment.

In debt slavery, the person was leased and if he died, you simply leased a new slave.

Here’s how it worked: Traditional slavery ended in the South in  1865, with the arrival of Union troops. They were followed by the arrival of Northerners to oversee the rights of freed slaves during the period known as Reconstruction, 1866-77.

It was a short era — when Blacks achieved human rights and citizenship, and were actually inserted into Southern legislatures. They could live where they liked, work for whom they chose, acquire land and use public accommodations.

It was too good to last, mainly because the defeated, bankrupt, and humiliated South could not stand it.

Many news laws turned slights into crimes, such as vagrancy. That made unemployment a crime, a crime that was enforced almost exclusively on Black people. It was the birth of neoslavery.

Gambling was a crime, adultery was a crime, carrying a knife was a crime, cursing was a crime, talking too loud was a crime, riding a freight train was a crime. You get the idea.

A sheriff would arrest a former slave, swear out an affidavit and haul him before a county judge, who would find him guilty, and impose a fine. Let’s say $5 (about $120 in today’s cash.) 

The freed slave didn’t have $5, so he was sentenced to six months in jail, which would be a miserable experience.

Out of the blue, a white benefactor would appear and offer to pay the fine, if the Black man would work for him for, say, six months.

That might have sounded better than jail, and the illiterate Black man would sign a contract that he could not read with an X for a signature.

The benefactor might have been an agent for a company, let’s say the notorious Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, which put him to work in a mine.

Tennessee might pay the county $12 a month for the use of the prisoner. Counties across the South recognized a cash crop better than cotton and started rounding up Black people, mostly men. (Tennessee eventually was acquired by U.S. Steel, which has become a target for reparations. Right now, Japan’s Nippon Steel Company is buying U.S. Steel. Will Japan get the reparations bill?)

Since the companies did not own the slaves, their welfare was of no concern. They could feed them next to nothing, keep them under guard during the day and in chains at night, have them sleep on thin, vermin-infested sheets, even work them naked.

The workday was sunup to sundown, even longer in the mines, where they worked underground with no need for sunlight. They worked in foul air, breathing coal dust, often standing in water that was filled with bodily waste, and sometimes was the only water to drink.

Outbreaks of dysentery were common, along with a range of other diseases.

Bodies were buried in unmarked graves next to work sites, thrown into rivers, or burned.

The slaves were kept compliant by frequent brutal beatings, often with a three or four-foot long strap of leather, four inches wide, attached to a wooden handle. 

Whips also were used, along with a form of waterboarding that didn’t cause the physical injuries that the beatings did.

The book relates the many kinds of corporal punishment that were employed without thought, because Blacks were believed to be subhuman. 

Even with that, some Christian owners believed that cruelty was morally wrong, and declined physical punishment.

Along the way, President Theodore Roosevelt sent prosecutors to the South, but over long years, and many defeats, he tired.

The U.S. Supreme Court also failed Black Americans when it legitimized the myth  of  “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Congress and most Northern citizens decided it was time to move on, leaving Southern Blacks to their fate.

“The truth was that African Americans were trapped in a catch-22,” the author writes, “between the laws criminalizing the mores of black life, and other laws that effectively barred them from assimilating into mainstream white American society or improving their economic position.”

The descriptions of the physical atrocities were almost too much to read, and I have barely scratched the surface here.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation was that some forms of debt slavery remained in the South until the 1940s.

——

 If we take this book to be authoritative, and I do, while it proves slavery lasted 80 years longer than we believed, it settles a brouhaha of a few months ago over an assertion that some Black people “benefited” from slavery because it taught them useful skills. “Slavery” was published in 2008, and was unchallenged in these assertions:

“The slaves were the true experts in the tasks of cotton production on most farms; it many cases it was slaves who directed the gangs of other slaves in their daily work.”

And: “Without former slaves — and their steady experience and cooperation in the fields — the white South was crippled.”

The book referenced the many trades — from carpentry to smithing to mining — Blacks mastered, which gave them skills to support themselves after liberation.

The controversy earlier this year was kindled by people who could not accept the narrow statement of fact. No one said slavery was good, just that within the evil of slavery, there were some minor benefits for a few.

“Slavery”  makes passing mention of the fact that some enslaved Blacks were permitted by their owners to perform tasks to earn money, which they used to buy their own freedom.

Rare, yes. Also rare, but factual, were the free Blacks who themselves owned slaves.

Facts are facts and must be honored. 

Slavery was an ancient, evil, and world-wide institution. There is no arguing that.

And now there is no arguing that it persisted much longer than we might have imagined.

That might have been what my friend Michael Days wanted me to know, and I thank him for handing me a flashlight.

But “Slavery,” the book, and neoslavery, ended in 1945, almost 80 years ago.

I believe is that the United States of 2023 is no more like the United States of 1945, than the Germany of today is like the Germany of 1945.

Remnants of racism remain, but they are unfashionable, unspoken in decent company. 

Will racism ever disappear entirely? 

I doubt it, because that would require a change in human nature, which is not always pretty.

But racism can be, and should be, and must be, suppressed. And largely, in today’s America, it is.