The Slave Power was not defeated after the destruction of the Confederacy. It was sublimated. Like a radioactive piece of crust, the Slave Power was pushed under the earth, but it was never vanquished. It remained there, technically illegal, but it would strike on the roads or by the rails, and steal away with the black citizens of the South.
Was it dead? Was it a ghost? Pale. White. Bloodless but bloodthirsty. Having been skinned by America, the Slave Power killed the Law and wore its face; it desecrated its face forever.
Where did it steal away? To Hell. It pulled black souls into the lightless pits of Alabama's heart, into the red hot factories of Birmingham and Atlanta, and back onto the plantations of Florida. What did the Slave Power do? It threw "them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."
The Slave Power instituted what Blackmon describes as an "era of neoslavery". The laws were different, but the effects were the same. You had to accept your position on a farm, not get an education, ask a white master for permission to do anything... and if you left your farm or failed to ask your white master for permission, then the next white man to set his eyes on you could pay the sheriff to make you lawfully his.
Perhaps it was different: free blacks could be enslaved, and an enslaved black was an expendable resource to be pushed to the limit, not "capital" to be nurtured.
And yet, they were more differences: industrialization came to the South following the black soot of coal and iron. Imagine the rise in labor prices! Iron, coal, cotton! Imagine how the industrial giants, the plantation lords must have felt competing against one another to see their profits eaten away by the dirty, greasy, tan faces of poor whites and the free, brown faces of blacks.
You must imagine! For rather than facing losing their wealth, potential wealth, and power the Capitalists enslaved the latter group and pit the former against them. And the South helped. In Alabama, 75% of annual state revenue was, at one point, directly from slave buyers' payments. These laws were crafted by Confederate leaders to line their own pockets, build their empires, and to erect monuments to themselves in their capitals. And that is exactly what they did.
The Slave Power hides in plain sight with a tempting bottle of Purel. There is a desire to sanitize history; there has always been this desire. In the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt had to push back against a wave of revisionist white apathy who wanted to forget the Civil War was a war for and against slavery. In the early 2000s, we have to push back against revisionist white apathy, as well.
"Why has there continued to be wealth, income, and education gaps between black and white Americans into the 2010s?" It's a common question. It's an ignorant question. The answer is very simple: "Your grandmother was probably alive when some Southern blacks were being held in a state indistinguishable from slavery."
Whatever you thought Jim Crow was like, Blackmon shows that it was most definitely worse.
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