THE PROOF THAT REAL SLAVERY PERSISTED into the 20th century, overt slavery, with people being held in involuntary servitude in the former Confederate states. their bodies, their persons sold for profit, their rights alienated from them, is conclusive. That the revived slave-power used legal fictions to enslave, mostly Black men, so as to pretend that the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was satisfied to the fictitious standards that lawyers and judges and "justices" pretend not to be able to see through was administered by the courts proves that lawyers and judges and, ultimately, "justices" were willing observers of and participants in that de facto slavery well into the 20th century. That is the kind of lying to get along and go along I was talking about, though that takes many other forms, as well.
Here's a lecture given at the Smithsonian by Douglas A. Blackmon about his book Slavery by Another Name: The Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
You can read the introduction of his book here, though there is a prohibition on quoting it that I'd rather not risk at the NPR website. It proves that the federal government knew about the pseudo-legalistic abduction of Black men, even children by county and local police and governments and sold into slavery, it was so common and so persistent that there is no credible argument that it totally escaped the notice of the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court which had members who came from some of those states which practiced de facto slavery during their professional lives.
I would guess that that practice or its like persisted even longer along with its motives, that the white culture of slavery, the economic habits of those who owned cotton plantations and mines and lumber camps and turpentine distilleries, the habits of slaver-economics that were beneficial to those slavers and the habits of the underclasses who they preyed on are not entirely dead, now. The popularity of the idea of reviving chain-gangs and other forms of brutal, involuntary servitude in Republican-fascist politics and entertainment media would support that, and, as with the revival of the KKK in the film industry during that period of overt neo-slavery, Hollywood and TV and the internet entertainment sectors will reinforce that kind of thing.
That history is certainly a surprise to most white Americans, certainly those of us who grew up and were schooled where it didn't happen. It is almost as certain that it was no news to Black People who certainly know more about their actual subjugation than people like me.
The lecture by Blackmon points out that there was, actually, a period when the Emancipation Proclamation had some effect, even in the South, though not all over it. He goes into a little detail about how alleged crime was the lever used to reimpose actual slavery for the benefit of the economic elite. It would be interesting to find out how those with the power to reimpose slavery in that period through fictions peddled to susceptible whites and the kind of legalistic fiction that certainly doesn't really fool lawyers and judges and "justices" and the role that the media, the news and, especially, the more influential and potent entertainment media played in promoting those lies, through novels, through movies and through other means of corrupting the morals of that group most susceptible to such corruption, white Americans. It would also be useful to show how the white laboring classes have had their own wages and work conditions damaged by the persistence of the stolen labor of those who should be their strongest allies in seeking justice instead of their enemies, as they get suckered into being.
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