'Slavery by Another Name': PBS documentary explores forced servitude after the Emancipation Proclamation
Share with others:
PASADENA, Calif. -- American history often gets passed on in a too-simple narrative, especially in pop culture. It's presented as black and white; there were good guys and bad guys.
PBS's "Slavery by Another Name" (9 p.m. Monday, WQED-TV), directed by Sam Pollard and based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name by co-executive producer Douglas Blackmon, reveals a largely hidden history that belies the popular narrative that the enslavement for African-Americans ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. This 90-minute documentary film recounts -- through recreations and interviews -- how emancipation was a bitter economic pill for former slave owners to swallow. So they found a substitute.
A loophole in the 13th Amendment worked in their favor: Slavery was abolished except as punishment for a crime. "Slavery by Another Name" recounts efforts to retain the practice of slavery by enacting contrived laws that made it a crime for a black man to walk beside a railroad, to speak loudly in the company of white women or to be unable to prove his employment on a moment's notice.
When: 9 p.m. Monday, PBS.
Narrator: Laurence Fishburne.
This led to "convict leasing" in which the state would lease prisoners to be used as laborers by plantation owners and even corporations. It provided a new revenue stream for the state and inexpensive, union-free labor for companies.
"Slavery by Another Name" explains how conditions for these forced laborers were often worse than conditions for slaves in the pre-Civil War era.
"It was never in the economic interest of a slave owner to kill his own slaves or abuse them so terribly they couldn't work anymore," Mr. Blackmon explains in the film. "Their economic value protected them in certain ways. After the Civil War, someone working their forced laborers would push them to the very limits of human endurance."
At a PBS press conference last month, Mr. Blackmon said his book grew out of a story he wrote for the Wall Street Journal -- excerpted and published by the Post-Gazette in July 2001 -- about the use of forced labor in Alabama's Pratt Mines by Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., which was purchased by Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel in 1907. The use of convict labor continued there until 1912, Mr. Blackmon reported.
U.S. Steel receives only a brief mention in the "Slavery by Another Name" documentary, which shows the impact of this practice that wasn't investigated by federal authorities until 1922 with no prosecutions for it until 1942. In 1951, the U.S. Congress finally passed more explicit laws making any form of slavery a crime, Mr. Blackmon writes.
First Published February 12, 2012 12:00 am
