For the average white American, including but not limited to those alarmed by new revelations about conventional American history’s venerated (white) icons, Blackmon’s book details the continuous subjugation and exploitation of black Americans living in the southern states from the collapse of Reconstruction to the end of World War II. The book’s lessons about our buried past that must be exhumed and examined, if we are to come to any consensus understanding of what most black Americans already know.
It is a certainty that many of us who are not resistant to obvious facts might note that the end of World War II does not in any way mark the end of the oppression of African Americans. But Blackmon’s history comes to a definitive end with the series of presidential executive orders, congressional legislation and court orders that made neoslavery in all its many forms illegal.
The conclusion that best matches the evidence he presents is that the defeat of the Confederacy and the brief Reconstruction period that followed was not the end of slavery, but a brief interlude before a reinvented form of slavery developed and prevailed in the South for another 75 years. The book tells a detailed story of the greed, inhumanity and hypocrisy that indicts Americans of the period, both in the South and the North. That indictment remains open today, to the extent that the truth told by the book continues to face fierce resistance.
To propel its vividly real story, Slavery by Another Name documents the lives of numerous southern blacks who suffered under Jim Crow, were arrested on charges both minor and bogus, and sentenced to hard labor in private enterprises of all descriptions, including major industrial operations that would one day become corporate behemoths, like, say U.S. Steel. In most cases, those sentenced to such hard labor would find themselves whipped, shackled, starved, driven to escape or to madness, and resentenced after any act of resistance. Blackmon describes the lives of former slaves and their descendants who found themselves re-enslaved and often worked until, sickened, maimed and broken, they could work no more; their bodies burned in kilns and coke ovens and buried in unmarked graves.
Though Blackmon’s book is driven by the partially resurrected histories of numerous African American men and women in the south who labored and struggled and resisted during the period, neither the federal government nor northern commercial interests fall outside of the book’s indictment of their complicity and failures. By and large, most northern whites not directly complicit in the southern regime were either ignorant of or untroubled by the inhuman treatment of black Americans in the south.
Of course, most northern whites were equally indifferent to the way segregation and racism plagued the lives of African Americans living in the north. Such indifference transformed itself into something more malignant when racism and white supremacy meant that African Americans who migrated northward in the hope that they could live more viable and comfortable lives found themselves crammed into substandard housing, attending separate and unequal schools, shut out of a wide range of well-paid jobs, and brutally policed by forces that didn’t look like them and feared them.
Natalie Moore’s The South Side, A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, turns out to be a great read to pair with Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name. To begin with, Moore didn’t have to unearth histories buried in unmarked graves. A native Chicagoan whose grandparents arrived in the city in the first wave of the Great Migration, Moore, a reporter with public radio station WBEZ, combines both family stories of life on the south side with a precise, journalistic look at the segregation, redlining and disinvestment that have plagued the lives of African Americans in Chicago over the last 100 years.
I’m a native Southsider myself. I graduated from all-white O’Keefe Elementary in 1961 and graduated from nearly all-black Hyde Park High in 1965. I’ve been in and out of Chicago for all of my adult life, living in Bridgeport (a notorious anti-black Irish Catholic enclave during most of the 20th century) from 2000 to 2007, and am back again now, living for the last four years in Bronzeville (known as the Black Metropolis from the first wave of the Great Migration until the end of World War II). I also drove a cab here in 1968 and 1969. But despite my real familiarity with parts of the south side, Moore’s book shared stories of thriving south side neighborhoods and high-quality public schools about which I had no clue because my whiteness and a relentless media preference for north-side-good-south-side-bad stories blinded me to the good things the black community could create and maintain in the face of disinvestment, segregation and white supremacy.
Moore’s book maintains an effective contrast as she alternates chapters about growing up in the all-black Chatham neighborhood, rich with black-owned businesses and professional services, and her graduation from the high-performing, far south side Morgan Park High School. Other chapters provide a detailed historical account of the way redlining and public policy decisions devastated so many south side neighborhoods.
Moore includes the histories of familiar political figures, like the first Mayor Daley, who in his early years was a member of the Hamburg Athletic Club, a major source of mob action during the 1919 race riot in Chicago, and three decades later he was the decision-maker behind building the Dan Ryan Expressway as a barrier between the South Side Black community and Bridgeport, the then all-white Irish Catholic neighborhood in which Daley was born and raised. Daley was also the driving force in building the high-rise Robert Taylor Homes on South State street, which housed the largest population and highest density of low-income Black families in the country. Daley’s appointed head of the city’s public school system, Benjamin Willis, played a key role in the era of white flight, keeping expanding Black student populations in under-funded, majority Black schools and barring them from transferring to below-capacity white schools. That Chicago remains the most-segregated city in the country is the enduring legacy of Daley’s reign.
Arguably, I have overstated the extent to which “buried” African American history is revealed in Slavery by Another Name or The South Side. Numerous carefully researched histories and memoirs telling the same stories have been written and published at an accelerating rate for the last 100 years. But, as any casual review of a list of banned books, especially books banned by southern states and cities, would reveal, the truth told by such books has been actively resisted over that entire period.
The recent controversies over the New York Times’ 1619 project and about Critical Race Theory are just two more examples of how far people will go to suppress the true history of African Americans. The good news is that a majority of Americans, both black and white, are no longer willing to wait for the truth to be heard. The Black Lives Matter movement has become a multi-racial and multi-cultural movement. The covid pandemic has taught the country a further and most emphatic lesson about the consequences of poverty, inequity and racism in health care. And climate change is beginning an almost daily course in new lessons about the price we will all pay, if inequality and white supremacy continue to divide us and throw away the human resources that will be essential in securing our collective future.
There’s really no time to waste. Opening our hearts to the truths that we have never been fully able to accept and understand is part of moving to aggressively fix that which is broken. Believe me, reading Slavery by Another Name and The South Side will help.
