Slavery By Another Name Summary

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Students are taught in most schools that slavery ended with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. However after reading Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name I am clearly convinced that slavery continued for many years afterward. It is shown throughout this book that slavery did not end until 1942, this is when the condition of what Blackmon refers to as "neoslavery" began. Neoslavery was practiced after the Emancipation Proclamation and until the beginning of World War II. Neoslavery was the practice of abducting African Americans, and/or imprisoning them based on exaggerated or false criminal charges, and forcing them into servitude long after the days of the Civil War. This practice was maintained mostly …show more content…
At the end of the nineteenth century, there was this enormous brick-making concern on the outskirts of Atlanta. It was owned by one of the most prominent men in the city, James English . He was once the mayor of Atlanta in the 1880’s, a famous Confederate war veteran, and was politically the most powerful man in the city. By the beginning of the twentieth century, he probably was the wealthiest man in the Southern United States and one of the wealthiest men in America. He had many business concerns, but at the base of his wealth and the base of his enterprises was this brick-making factory, which was worked entirely with these forced laborers who had been acquired from jails and also simply purchased from men who had kidnapped black men from the roadways of the South, which became an incredibly common phenomenon as this new market for black labor developed. And the Chattahoochee brickyard, as it was called, was a place that generated millions and millions of bricks. Millions of these bricks were used to make the sidewalks and streets of Atlanta's oldest neighborhoods, many of them still in use today. A string of witnesses told the legislative committee that prisoners at the plant were fed rotting and rancid food, housed in barracks rife with insects, driven with whips into the hottest and most-intolerable areas of the plant,