In this groundbreaking book, Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history. From the late 1870s through the mid-twentieth century, under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, thousands of African American men were arbitrarily arrested, hit with outrageous fines, and charged for room and board in state and county jails. With no means to pay these “debts,” prisoners were required to work them off. Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by landowners and forced into unpaid labor. In an iniquitous system, governments leased wrongly imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and large corporations—including U.S. Steel—looking for cheap and abundant labor. In factories, mines, lumber camps, quarries, and on farms throughout the South, armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and forced through extreme physical coercion to do the bidding of white masters. Revenues from neo-slavery poured into Southern state treasuries. The system was finally ended only in the 1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II.

Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME is a moving, sobering account of a little-known crime against African Americans, and the insidious legacy of white racism that reverberates today.