By Eric V. Copage

On June 18, the United States Senate unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery, the land of the free’s erstwhile “peculiar institution,” and the worst of its aftermath.

Was the apology America’s “Come to Jesus” moment regarding black people?

There certainly seemed to be a dewy-eyed acknowledgement of past sins.  According to the Washington Post, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the lead sponsor of the bill, said, “You wonder why we didn’t do it 100 years ago.”

An image from the book, "Slavery By Another Name," by Douglas A. Blackmon

The answer is easy:  A century ago the federal government turned a blind eye to slavery, which was still alive and well in the South. While Sen. Harkin acknowledges the injustices of the Jim Crow laws and subsequent discrimination after the Emancipation Proclamation, he doesn’t emphasize enough that actual slavery continued by other names and other means until the beginning of World War II. In the Pulitzer prize-winning book “Slavery by Another Name“ , author Douglas A. Blackmon points out that segregation was the least of the evils or racial relations through the mid-20th century. Thousands of black men were outright kidnapped, chained and forced to do back-breaking labor.

In his bleakly riveting volume, Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, recounts in teeth-grinding detail how in the late 19th century white Northerners  tired of the political gridlock that resulted from white Southerners’ demands to handle “the Negro question,” since most blacks still lived in the South. Eventually, the Northerners caved in.

As Northern influence in the South waned, Southern state and local governments began weaving a web of laws and practices whose effect was to ensnare black people, especially black men. By 1900 the black population in the South was more or less as subjugated as it had ever been.

“Any black man who couldn’t prove he had a job at any given moment, any black man who sought to change employers without getting permission from the first employer. . .” was subject to arrest, said Blackmon in an interview last year on the radio program Open Source. “Talking loudly in the presence of white women, walking near a railroad line on the property of a railroad company, an endless number of statutes were passed which made it nearly impossible to avoid prosecution.”

Ultimately, Blackmon said, “Being black became the crime,” an observation that to my ears has a contemporary ring. However, if arrested in the south during that period, our grandfathers and great grandfathers literally faced being sold by sheriffs to business men, and then forced to do mule labor on plantations, railroads, mills, lumber camps and factories, as thousands upon thousands of them were.

Before reading Blackmon’s book, I had been familiar with the laws and circumstances he described. I might not have known their dismal particulars, but like every child who grew up in the later part of 20th century in America, I was familiar through school lessons with the broad outlines of share cropping, peonage, forced labor camps, prison leasing, voter intimidation and other methods used to disenfranchise black people.

But Blackmon opened my eyes to how those individual outrages had the collective effect of re-establishing slavery – what Blackmon calls neo-slavery.  He writes that although slavery’s new incarnation included no deeds of ownership and the condition was not passed on to one’s children, it was in some ways more brutal than the chattel slavery it superseded.

In chattel slavery white owners had an economic incentive to preserve the health of the slaves, and to encourage them to live in family units, if only to enrich the white family with more slaves. Not so with American slavery in the first half of the 20^th century.

For instance, Blackmon said, in his Open Source radio interview, “In a relatively small work camp where you have 75 or 80 forced laborers, or maybe 100, there might well be 300 to 400 floggings in any given month.  The men in the mines were beaten in the morning if they had failed to remove eight tons of coal the day before.  And they were beaten at the end of the day if they failed to remove eight tons of coal that day.  They were starved, they were deprived of health care.  And the general attitude of those who controlled these laborers was that ‘As long as I am able to keep them for one year or two years, I’ll get back my investment. . .and if they die, I can cheaply find another one.’ ”

Blackmon recounts one story of an influential white landowner who through a network of men over a two-year period seized between 40 and 100 black men—just randomly had them rounded up on spurious “vagrancy” charges—as they went about their business of walking from one place to another, and then sold them into neo-slavery, where they worked for years, sometimes decades.

Atlanta’s older sidewalks are paved with the millions of bricks made by these neo-slaves at Chattahoochee Brick Company, Blackmon asserts. There were even times that a kind of Sunday afternoon slave auction took place, in which a white man who controlled black workers would go to Chattahoochee Brick and negotiate with the guards there to buy or swap captives.

U.S. Steel Corporation relied on forced black laborers in Alabama coal mines in the early 20th century, a fact Blackmon first revealed in a 2001 article in the Wall Street Journal, which inspired his book.

(When the article came out, a company spokesman said in a press release that “U. S. Steel inherited this practice from TCI  [Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, which was purchased by U.S. Steel]– a practice objectionable by today’s standards but widespread at the time.”  The spokesman added that Blackmon ignored several salient facts about the company’s involvement with convict leasing, including that “U. S. Steel was a participant for only four of the 60 years that the State of Alabama leased convict labor.”)

Why am I dredging this up when arguably I should be celebrating the Senate making an effort to acknowledge the evils of slavery?   I’m bringing it up because we went through a similar process during Reconstruction, the era between 1865 and 1877, when blacks, though still impoverished, established independent communities, schools, acquired voting rights, attained political office, and were beginning to experience something akin to real freedom.

But throughout Reconstruction white Southerners resisted steps toward black equality. In the PBS documentary “Reconstruction: The Second Civil War,” the historian, Eric Foner, said that by the 1870’s the growing sentiment among white Northerners was,  “ ‘Okay, blacks have been given their chance. They’ve been given their rights. Now it’s sink or swim.’ ”

To my ears, that attitude has a contemporary ring.

The same documentary quotes from an editorial in the Chicago Tribune of that period: “Is it not time for the colored race to stop playing baby? The whites of America have done nobly in outgrowing the old prejudices against them. They cannot hurry this process by law. Let them obtain social equality as every other man, woman, and child in this world obtains it—by showing themselves in their lives the social equals of those with whom they wish to consort. If they do this, year-by-year the prejudices will die away.”

Meanwhile, black social, economic and educational progress continued to crumble away for decades.

I’m concerned that Harkin’s question about why the Senate didn’t pass such a measure a century ago is a dangerously naïve view of America.

The civil rights legislation and affirmative action measures meant to address the disadvantages wrought by slavery still failed to acknowledge just how recent de facto slavery really was.   And despite having a black president, black congressmen, black governors and mayors, today’s black advances are no less fragile than they were during Reconstruction.

Not even Oprah’s success has stemmed the tide of residential re-segregation, continued income and educational disparity, and disproportionately high black incarceration rates.  Some legal experts say the Voting Rights Act survived by only a whisper, after the June 22 ruling by the United States Supreme Court, and some predict that the Act will be challenged again within a few years.

“This resolution will not fix lingering injustices,” said Harkin about the Senate’s apology for slavery.  “While we are proud of this resolution and believe it is long overdue, the real work lies ahead.”

I think the real work lies in looking behind us, and the first order of business is to get our dates straight, and calling a spade a spade.

Eric V. Copage, a former editor at the New York Times, is the author of several books including the best-selling and award-winning “Black Pearls: Daily Meditations, Affirmations and Inspirations for African Americans” and “Fruits of the Harvest,” a cook book.    His Web site is www.blackpearlsliving.com.