This is how John Davis became a slave:
He was walking one evening from the train depot in Goodwater, Ala., when a white man appeared in the road. "Nigger," he demanded, "have you got any money?"
The white man, Robert Franklin, was a constable. He claimed Mr. Davis owed him. This was news to Mr. Davis.
"I don't owe you anything," he said.
But what Mr. Davis said did not matter. He was arrested that night and summarily convicted. A wealthy landowner, John Pace, paid the alleged $40 debt and a $35 fine in exchange for Mr. Davis' mark - Mr. Davis was illiterate - on a contract binding him to work 10 months at any task Mr. Pace demanded. For all intents and purposes, the one man now owned the other. For all intents and purposes, John Davis was John Pace's slave.
This was September 1901, 36 years after the end of the Civil War.
It would be appalling if it happened once. Douglas A. Blackmon says it happened hundreds of thousands of times in Alabama alone. Mr. Blackmon, Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, is the author of a compelling new book, Slavery by Another Name. Yours truly flatters himself that he is well versed in black history, but this book introduced me to a chapter of that history I did not know.
I didn't know, for example, about the so-called convict leasing system of the South, wherein poor black men were routinely snatched up and tried on false, petty or nonexistent charges by compliant courts, assessed some fine they could not afford and then "sold" for the cost of that fine to some mine, turpentine farm or plantation, the money going back to the judges and sheriffs.
I did not know that when men served their time, they were sometimes subject to prompt rearrest on even flimsier charges - such as that of "stealing" the jail clothes they walked out in.
I did not know the system was so elaborate that businesses could put in orders with local sheriffs to arrest the number of men they needed.
I did not know about black men chained up in swamps and workhouses, held under armed guard, fed gruel, worked beyond human endurance, beaten beyond human decency, subjected to cruelties that made antebellum slavery seem merciful by comparison. After all, in the antebellum years, a slave represented an investment of up to $2,000, but in this new economy, slave labor was cheap, which made slave life cheaper still.
Mr. Blackmon says white men were openly buying and selling black men under this system until after World War II.
