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Slavery by Another Name Essay

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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…

And in the cases of Alabama, there were at least 100,000 African American men between the 1890s and the 1930s were leased or sold by the state of Alabama to coal mines, iron ore mines, sawmills, timber harvesting camps, cotton plantations, turpentine stills, all across the state. And so at least 200,000 African Americans, just in Alabama, were forced into the system, just in the most informal ways. And there are very well documented records of thousands of Black men who died under these circumstances during that period of time. Stories of men like Jonathan Davis, who in the fall of 1901, left his cotton field trying to reach the home of his wife's parents, where she was being cared for and would soon die of an illness. He was trying to reach her before she died. And on his way to the town, which was 15 or 20 miles away where she was being taken care of, he was accosted on the road by a constable, and essentially is kidnapped from the roadway and sold to a white farmer a few days later for $45. This is something that is named in the book to dozens of people that happened to. It's clear some version of that sort of kidnapping happened to hundreds and hundreds of other African Americans. And again, all of that is just in Alabama, and there were versions of this going on in all of the

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