Slavery by Another Name, Part Three: The Final Chapter of Slavery

Part Three of Three

Source note: This series summarizes the uploaded SuperSummary guide to Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name. It follows the guide’s presentation and should be read as a summary rather than independent archival verification.

Content note: This article discusses forced labor, mine deaths, torture, racial violence, sexual abuse, lynching, murder, and other disturbing material described in the source.

Previous article: Part Two: Harvest of an Unfinished War

The Arrest of Green Cottenham

Part Three returns to Green Cottenham, the man whose forgotten life anchors Blackmon’s investigation. Green regularly spent time around the train station in Columbiana, Alabama, where young Black men gathered, traveled in search of work, and moved along railroad routes.

In 1908, local law enforcement seized Green and accused him of riding a train without a ticket. The guide states that there was no proof supporting the charge. He was sentenced to hard labor and assessed a fine he could not pay. The inability to pay extended his sentence.

Green was then transferred from the county jail to Slope No. 12 of the Pratt Mines. In practical terms, a free Black man had been turned into an industrial laborer owned for the duration of his sentence by a corporation receiving prisoners from local government.

Inside Slope No. 12

Slope No. 12 was technologically advanced for its time, but the guide presents that modernity as deeply ironic. A sophisticated industrial operation coexisted with a labor system that reproduced slavery.

Prisoners entered narrow coal passages, loaded heavy amounts of coal, worked under constant pressure, and faced mine collapses, explosions, disease, and abusive discipline. Men were chained while sleeping to prevent escape. Some tunnels were so confined that workers had to crawl or slide through them.

Firsthand Black testimony from the mines is limited because many laborers were poor and illiterate and had little opportunity to record their experiences. The guide cites rare accounts describing whippings, suspension, shackling devices, and the “water cure,” a form of torture designed to inflict extreme suffering without necessarily keeping a prisoner away from work for long.

Green Cottenham’s Death

Green became seriously ill. The guide describes him as suffering from syphilis and tuberculosis while enduring exhausting labor and brutal living conditions. His health declined until he died in the mining system.

Other laborers placed his body in a pine box and buried him near the mines. Blackmon’s later effort to locate the burial site becomes a symbol of how thoroughly the lives of many forced laborers were erased from public memory.

Labor, Race, and the Breaking of Strikes

Forced labor had another economic purpose: it weakened free workers. Coal companies could rely on prisoners when paid miners went on strike. This created resentment among white workers, who sometimes blamed the Black prisoners even though those prisoners had no choice about being in the mines.

At one point, Black and white free miners joined together in a strike. The guide describes Alabama political leaders as alarmed by the possibility of interracial labor solidarity. An armed militia was sent to break the strike. The episode illustrates one of Blackmon’s recurring arguments: white supremacy helped prevent poor Black and white workers from uniting around shared economic interests.

Death as a Cost of Doing Business

The mines produced enormous profits and enormous death tolls. Prisoners died from explosions, disease, toxic gases, falling coal, violence, and neglect. The guide describes company officials who knew about convict labor and abuse but continued using the system because it provided cheap production and reduced the leverage of free labor.

Blackmon’s analysis presents the industrial system as a partnership of capital, local government, law enforcement, and racial ideology. Each participant gained something: revenue, labor, political control, or social dominance. The people who paid the cost were the prisoners and their families.

Georgia’s Investigation and the End of Formal Leasing

Georgia eventually investigated corruption in its convict-leasing system. The hearings uncovered thousands of men and women held in forced labor, widespread abuse, resale of prisoners, brutal punishments, and the use of child labor.

Powerful Atlanta businessmen had profited from convict labor in mines, brick factories, railroads, and other enterprises. Public exposure helped push Georgia to abolish the private leasing of prisoners.

But Blackmon stresses that abolition of one system did not mean freedom. Forced labor changed form. Prisoners were shifted into chain gangs and public works. Black sharecroppers remained trapped by debt and labor restrictions. States could announce reform while continuing practices that restricted Black mobility and coerced labor.

Woodrow Wilson and the Political Defense of White Supremacy

The guide describes President Woodrow Wilson as an open white supremacist whose administration segregated federal workplaces and supported Southern control over racial policy. At the same time, popular culture helped revive heroic images of the Ku Klux Klan.

Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman helped inspire The Birth of a Nation, a film that glorified the Klan and reinforced racist stereotypes. In Blackmon’s framework, this mythology mattered because forced labor depended not only on laws and profits but also on a culture that portrayed Black freedom as dangerous and white domination as natural.

Murder, Public Scandal, and Slow Reform

The guide recounts the case of Georgia farmer John S. Williams, who used forced Black labor and later murdered prisoners to prevent them from testifying. The discovery of the bodies led to a rare conviction of a white man for murdering a Black person in the Jim Crow South.

Public outrage against forced labor also increased when white prisoners were caught in the same system. The guide notes that the deaths of white men sometimes produced reforms that years of Black suffering had failed to generate. This becomes one of the book’s recurring ironies.

Convict Leasing Becomes Chain Gangs

By the 1920s and 1930s, formal leasing to private mines had declined in some states, but the underlying logic survived. Thousands of Black men were still arrested for minor or highly discretionary offenses and sent to chain gangs, public works, or private labor.

Restrictions on movement, employment, debt, alcohol, gambling, and interracial relationships could all become tools of arrest. The guide argues that the label changed more quickly than the reality.

World War II and a Federal Policy Shift

A major change came in 1941. According to the guide, Attorney General Francis Biddle discovered that the federal government had largely left slavery complaints to Southern local authorities. With the United States entering World War II, the administration became concerned that American racism and forced labor could be used by enemy nations as propaganda.

Biddle issued Circular No. 3591, instructing federal prosecutors to pursue cases involving involuntary servitude and slavery more aggressively and to call the practice what it was rather than hiding it behind the narrower language of peonage.

The guide emphasizes the uncomfortable motive: the policy shift was driven significantly by wartime necessity and national image, not simply moral awakening. Still, stronger federal action made it harder for local authorities to shield forced labor.

From Neo-Slavery Toward the Civil Rights Era

Federal courts became more willing to reject defenses based on fake debts and coerced contracts. The guide says Congress later strengthened federal law against slavery in 1951. Mechanization also reduced employers’ dependence on manual forced labor.

Black veterans returned from World War II with heightened determination to challenge racial oppression. In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education rejected school segregation, symbolically reversing the legal order represented by Plessy v. Ferguson. Blackmon treats this as part of the transition out of what he calls the age of neo-slavery.

The Epilogue: Who Remembers, and Who Is Responsible?

Blackmon ends by returning to the present and asking what remains of Green Cottenham’s story. He searches for descendants, burial places, corporate records, and family memories. He finds that both Black and white families often know little about the system or are reluctant to discuss it.

The guide also follows the corporate descendants of companies that profited from forced labor. Some companies emphasized later mergers or claimed no knowledge of earlier practices. Blackmon argues that corporations were rarely required to account for their role in post-Civil War forced labor with the same intensity that governments were eventually forced to confront segregation.

One example in the guide is Wachovia Bank, which investigated historical connections to slavery, publicly acknowledged them, apologized, and supported scholarships and discussion. Blackmon contrasts that approach with institutions that preferred silence or distance.

Descendants and the Reparations Question

Black descendants interviewed by Blackmon did not all agree about how to respond to the past. Some believed the most important responsibility was to prevent repetition. Others believed companies and institutions that accumulated wealth through forced labor owed compensation or reparative action to descendants.

Blackmon does not reduce the issue to a single response. Instead, the guide presents historical memory itself as contested. Learning the truth can be painful, but refusing to learn it allows myths about freedom, crime, wealth, and racial inequality to survive unchallenged.

Biographical Profiles

Thomas Dixon Jr.

Dixon was a former preacher and writer whose fiction glorified white supremacy and romanticized the Ku Klux Klan. His work helped shape the cultural mythology later popularized in The Birth of a Nation.

Woodrow Wilson

Wilson became president in 1912. The guide describes him as a committed white supremacist who accepted Southern disenfranchisement of Black citizens, segregated parts of the federal workforce, and supported a states’ rights approach that limited federal interference in Southern racial policy.

Green Cottenham

Green remains the book’s moral and narrative center. His life connects emancipation, family history, discriminatory criminal law, corporate labor, disease, death, and historical erasure. Blackmon’s search for Green’s grave becomes a search for the forgotten history of thousands of people whose forced labor helped build the industrial South.

The Three-Part Argument in One View

Across the three parts, Blackmon presents a continuous story. Emancipation destroyed legal ownership of Black people, but white officials and employers created criminal and debt systems that restored control over Black labor. Federal intervention exposed the system but repeatedly failed to dismantle it. Formal convict leasing eventually declined, yet forced labor survived in new forms until political, economic, legal, and wartime pressures finally made it harder to sustain.

The final challenge is memory. The guide presents Blackmon’s argument that the economic and social consequences of this history did not vanish when the labor camps closed. Wealth accumulated, families were disrupted, political rights were suppressed, and generations of Black Americans were denied opportunities to build security and property on equal terms.

For that reason, Slavery by Another Name asks readers to reconsider the familiar timeline of American slavery. The Civil War ended chattel slavery in law, but the struggle over freedom, labor, citizenship, and racial power continued far into the twentieth century.

Series: Part One | Part Two | Part Three