![Journalist John Spivak took a series of photos at forced labor camps in Georgia in the 1930s. Many of them are included in Douglas Blackmon’s new book, Slavery By Another Name, which chronicles the Age of Neoslavery that existed throughout the American south from shortly after the Civil War up until the 1940s.
Blackmon is the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. Here he talks about the book with Bill Moyers.
[]African-Americans thousands and thousands of them worked for years and years of their lives with no compensation whatsoever, no ability to end up buying property and enjoying the mechanisms of accumulating wealth in the way that white Americans did. This was a part of denying black Americans access to education, denying black Americans access to basic infrastructure, like paved roads, the sorts of things that made it possible for white farmers to become successful.
[The] whole regime of the Black Codes, the way that they were enforced, the physical intimidation and racial violence that went on, all of these were facets of the same coin that made it incredibly less likely that African-Americans would emerge out of poverty in the way that millions of white Americans did at the same time.
[]These are events unlike Antebellum slavery. These are things that connect directly to the lives and the shape and pattern and structure of our society today.](http://media.tumblr.com/eVsjjJHV7amjohxfCn1Q1mUQ_500.jpg)
Journalist John Spivak took a series of photos at forced labor camps in Georgia in the 1930s. Many of them are included in Douglas Blackmon’s new book, Slavery By Another Name, which chronicles the Age of Neoslavery that existed throughout the American south from shortly after the Civil War up until the 1940s.
Blackmon is the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. Here he talks about the book with Bill Moyers.
[]African-Americans thousands and thousands of them worked for years and years of their lives with no compensation whatsoever, no ability to end up buying property and enjoying the mechanisms of accumulating wealth in the way that white Americans did. This was a part of denying black Americans access to education, denying black Americans access to basic infrastructure, like paved roads, the sorts of things that made it possible for white farmers to become successful.
[The] whole regime of the Black Codes, the way that they were enforced, the physical intimidation and racial violence that went on, all of these were facets of the same coin that made it incredibly less likely that African-Americans would emerge out of poverty in the way that millions of white Americans did at the same time.
[]These are events unlike Antebellum slavery. These are things that connect directly to the lives and the shape and pattern and structure of our society today.