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Description: Starred Review. Wall Street Journal bureau
chief Blackmon gives a groundbreaking and disturbing account of a sordid
chapter in American history—the lease (essentially the sale) of convicts
to commercial interests between the end of the 19th century and well
into the 20th. Usually, the criminal offense was loosely defined
vagrancy or even changing employers without permission. The initial
sentence was brutal enough; the actual penalty, reserved almost
exclusively for black men, was a form of slavery in one of hundreds of
forced labor camps operated by state and county governments, large
corporations, small time entrepreneurs and provincial farmers. Into this
history, Blackmon weaves the story of Green Cottenham, who was charged
with riding a freight train without a ticket, in 1908 and was sentenced
to three months of hard labor for Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad, a
subsidiary of U.S. Steel. Cottenham's sentence was extended an
additional three months and six days because he was unable to pay fines
then leveraged on criminals. Blackmon's book reveals in devastating
detail the legal and commercial forces that created this neoslavery
along with deeply moving and totally appalling personal testimonies of
survivors. Every incident in this book is true, he writes; one wishes it
were not so. (Mar.)
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