Neo-Slavery of African American

In Slavery By Another Name, a putlizer winner, Douglas Blackmon wrote an excellent book on how the Southern White de-enfranchised the African American through trick and terror and reinstated neo-slavery to the former Confederate states in the aftermath of 1865 Emancipation Proclaimation.

The book spoke about the lynching that frightened the African American into submission and servitude. The book spoke about how the African American were victim in the most appalling condition without respect and dignity, not to even mention right and lawful entitlement.

Black men toiled to death and black women were sexual play toy at whim of her White master. In the course of reading the book, I discern that a lot of lynching and attack on black were started by the unsubstantiated time-honored allegation of blackmen sexually attacking white girls.

The book elaborated in great details how the due process was manipulated by the White to convict large number of African American for seemingly minor or non-offence such as vagrancy and how these convict were quickly sold to labor or rather to be enslaved at various mines, farms and factory.

The working and living conditions were no different from a Gulag. The treatment meted out to the African American convict were inevitably inhuman and motivated by racism. The flogging, the whipping, the water torture were the daily routine every African American convicts had to face. The bloodhound were used to hunt down the run away. Many of them caught were first tortured and made to never live again.

The South was a society and a system where the justice was systematically denied to and cruelty was selectively applied to the African American. Almost every if not all Southern White institutions, media and church included, were innocent.

The segregation implemented in the South under the guise of the separate but equal doctrine was Apartheid, plain and simple.

No question that the White Supremacist's reign was morally untenable however the history shown that the emancipation was successfully highjacked and slavery was reincarnated with most American then stoodby and did little to live up to the American credo.

"It was a strange irony", in the word of Blackmon, "that after 74 years of hollow emancipation, the final delivery of African Americans from overt slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors perpetrated by an enemy country against its own despised minorities."

The turning point for the eventual success of the Civil Right movement stems more from American's akward position in treating her own citizen in reaction to the Nazist, Fascist and Communist ideologies.

It is like the old saying he who live in the glass house shall not throw stone. This was the awakening moment. The return of large number of African American soldier fighting the WW2
led to unprecedented civil right movement in taking discrimination to court.

One of which culminated in the landmark decision of Brown V. Board of Education 1954 that overruled Plessy v Ferguson 1896 which in turn led to the civl right legislation in the Johnson's Administration.

This is a great book to read and what I like best were the following passage where Blackmon reflected:

"whether any company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. we are formed in the molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our "fault". But it is undeniably our inheritance."

and in another passage:

"I had no hand in the horrors perpetrated by the 20th century slave masters who terrorized American Blacks for four generations. But it is nonetheless true that hundreds of millions of us spring from or benefit as a result of lines of descent that abided those crimes and benefited from them."