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Douglas A. Blackmon QUOTES

Douglas A. Blackmon QUOTES

21 " Alabama legislature swiftly passed a measure under which the orphans of freed slaves, or the children of blacks deemed inadequate parents, were to be "apprenticed" to their former masters. The South Carolina planter Henry William Ravenel wrote in September 1865: "There must… be stringent laws to control the negroes, & require them to fulfill their contracts of labour on the farms."44 "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

22 " Altogether, millions of mostly obscure entries in the public record offer details of a forced labor system of monotonous enormity. Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

23 " were portrayed by most historians as an almost static component of U.S. society. Their leaders changed with each generation, but the mass of black Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the same people still not free fifty years later. There was no acknowledgment of the effects of cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation rise above the cusp of poverty only to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new generation of an ever-changing population outnumbered in persons and resources. Yet in the attics and basements of courthouses, old county jails, storage sheds, and local historical societies, I found a vast record of original documents and personal narratives revealing a very different version of events. "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

24 " The erasure of his history was completed by the moniker placed on him by white captors. Scipio was a classic slave name, one of a catalogue of cynical, almost sneering, designations rooted in the white South’s popular fetish for the mythology of the classic cultures. It came from the name of a second-century general who governed Rome as Scipio Africanus. For the Roman Scipio, this was a tribute to his victory over Hannibal in the year 201, extending Roman control over Carthage and all of northern Africa. His reign had also seen the brutal suppression of the first great Roman slave revolt, in which on one occasion more than twenty thousand rebelling slaves were crucified. "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

25 " Over fifteen years, thousands of men and women were forced to the plantation and held in stockades under the watch of armed guards. "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

26 " How had so large a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded oblivion of poverty and obscurity? "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

27 " Wilson accepted the most distended idealization of the antebellum South and demonization of the black political participation that followed. "Domestic slaves were almost uniformly dealt with indulgently and even affectionately by their masters," he wrote. The Reconstruction era of African American governance in states with black majorities was "an extraordinary carnival of public crime." Wilson called the eventual suppression of black political activity "the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites."38 "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

28 " compelled to help arm the troops fighting to preserve his enslavement. "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

29 " African Americans had been compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial field near the family home place south of Birmingham. "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

30 " Underscoring southerners’ sense that it was hypocritical for their region to be targeted for its racial misdeeds, residents in Belleville, Illinois, went on a rampage a day after the Dadeville editorial appeared. A black schoolteacher named David Wyatt and the town's white school superintendent had argued over the renewal of Wyatt's teaching certificate. An altercation ensued. The superintendent was shot, but not seriously harmed. Wyatt was arrested and taken to jail. By nightfall, at least two thousand whites were gathered in the town—including many women and children encouraged to attend the spectacle. A phalanx of two hundred men attacked the steel doors at the rear of the jail with sledgehammers, pounding it with thousands of hammer blows. The city's police did not voluntarily hand the prisoner over to the crowd, but also gave no meaningful resistance. Wyatt, an educated and imposing man—standing six feet three inches tall—waited in his cell on the second floor of the jail, enveloped in the cacophony of the hammers pounding out his death beat. After half an hour, the doors splintered open. Wyatt was seized from his cell and his head immediately smashed. Dragged into the street, the mob surged around him, kicking and stomping his body until it was matted in blood and dirt. A rope was secured to his neck and tossed to two men who had climbed a telegraph pole. Hoisted just a few feet off the ground, Wyatt's body whipped back and forth as members of the crowd gouged, stabbed, and sliced his torso, legs, and arms with knives. Others in the mob gathered pickets from nearby fences and roadside signs to build a crude pyre beneath his dangling corpse. Still more went for gasoline and benzene. Soon Wyatt's body was engulfed in flame. By the time the earliest churchgoers left their homes on Sunday, June 7, the grotesque form of Wyatt's carbonized remains lay amid "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

31 " I was also troubled by a sensibility in much of the conventional history of the era that these events were somehow inevitable. White animosity toward blacks was accepted as a wrong, but logical extension of antebellum racial views. Events were presented as having transpired as a result of large--seemingly unavoidable--social and anthropological shifts, rather than the specific decisions and choices of individuals. What's more, African Americans were portrayed by most historians as an almost static component of U.S. society: Their leaders changed with each generation, but the mass of black Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the same people still not free fifty years later. There was no acknowledgement of the effects of cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation rise above the cusp of poverty only to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new generation of an ever-changing population out-numbered in persons and resources. "

― Douglas A. Blackmon

32 " In my quest to find Green Cottenham, I also discovered an unsettling truth that when white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a 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 molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our "fault". But it is undeniably our inheritance. "

― Douglas A. Blackmon

33 " too; the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1865 to formally abolish slavery, specifically permitted involuntary servitude "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

34 " laborer named Orange Neeley Later, Eberhart brandished his pistol and forced Calloway "to pinion his own beloved son, Robert Calloway, outstretched to the ground, and did make the said Charley Calloway hold his said son while the said William Eberhart did violently and unmercifully beat the said Robert Calloway with heavy sticks and other weapons" until the boy was crippled. As a final indignity, Eberhart—like the Alabama slavemasters who attempted to seize the children of freedmen in the 1860s—forced Calloway to sign contracts apprenticing his remaining children, two of whom were still nursing babies, into Eberhart's control until they turned twenty-one years old.25 "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II