By Lee A. Daniels

The world has long known of the infamous gulags the communist authorities of the Soviet Union constructed in the early twentieth century to imprison those they deemed significant threats to their power, or merely inconvenient to not have locked away.

Monday night a Public Broadcasting Service documentary showed that before the Soviet gulags, there was in the fervently capitalist United States – in the American South — of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a strikingly similar system of prisoner and “forced-labor” camps built on a similar culture of injustice and overwhelmingly reserved for black Americans. Five years ago journalist Douglas Blackmon published the book on which the documentary is based that gave this barbaric system of internal exile its proper definition – Slavery By Another Name.

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Blackmon shows that the cruelty of legalized segregation in the South went far beyond the “surface” of Jim Crow many are familiar with – the “white” and “colored” drinking fountains, schools, transportation waiting rooms, entrances to movie theaters and other public places; the exclusion from the region’s public and private colleges and universities, and the racial criminality of many of its judiciary, police officials and political officeholders.

He burrows deeper, to examine the devastating impact on black Americans of the alliance of two kinds of crutelty: the one, the rapacious drive of the era’s industrial capitalists; the other, the murderous insistence of the South’s white majority that blacks be subjugated by any means necessary.

This was not the outmoded, inefficient, feudalistic chattel slavery of the antebellum era that had hampered the gathering force – and profits – of the fledgling industrial dynamic. This was a neo-slavery fit for a post-Civil War America that wanted to have its cake and eat it, too.

It wanted to boast to excess of its allegiance to freedom and democracy, while it warped the nation’s democratic institutions to use black Americans to the same end: to kidnap them and force them to work in terrible conditions in order to benefit white companies, white communities and white individuals.

And, it must not be forgotten, its equally important corollary: To prevent black Americans as a group from developing the human capital and gathering the financial capital to escape their impoverishment and powerlessness.

In that regard, Blackmon’s book must be read with Gene Dattel’s 2009 book, Cotton and Race in the Making of America, which bound black Southerners to the region’s cotton fields, and the political, economic and physical predations of southern whites, for nearly a century after Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Both of these magnificent, and sorrowful, books make the point that there were the most powerful economic imperatives undergirding whites’ psychological antipathy toward blacks. Those two forces produced a barrier to the realization of black liberation – and American democracy – that remains infuriating to contemplate to this day.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline