Slavery by Another Name

Slavery by Another Name is a 90 minute documentary that challenges one of America’s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Wall Street Journal senior writer Douglas A. Blackmon, the documentary explores the little-known story of the post-Emancipation era and the labor practices and laws that effectively created a new form of slavery in the South that persisted well into the 20th century. It was produced by Twin Cities Public Television and broadcasting a special 90-minute film on Monday, Feb. 13, at 9pm ET/PT, 8pm CT, in most cities

This film vividly presents the story of the reimposition of actual slavery in the South, after Reconstruction, which reached its height in the early 20th Century and continued with its condoning by the US Dept. of Justice until Pearl Harbor.

The consequences for African-American families and communities in the South were horrific, and it represented a form of judicial, political and economic terrorism which still reverberates in American politics. The film concentrates on a few stories of the hundreds of thousands of African-American men dragged into the “convict-leasing system” – and assigned to coal mines and farming, with murderous consequences for them and incredible profits for the corporations which used them. In coal mining, the slave labor system was explicitly used to stop one of the most important strikes in Southern history – the UMWA’s effort to stop convict leasing at the US Steel mines in Birmingham. That strike was smashed by the militia in an incident every bit as brutal as the well-known incident in Ludlow, CO.