"A Different Kind of Slavery"

Douglas A. Blackmon, Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, has written Slavery by Another Name, a book that chronicles how companies controlled by two prominent Atlantans uses forced labor, thousands of black laborers, to rebuild Atlanta, Georgia. An excerpt was recently published in the paper's weekend edition:

Between the Emancipation Proclamation and the beginning of World War II, millions of African-Americans were compelled into or lived under the shadow of the South's new forms of coerced labor. Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands were arbitrarily detained, hit with high fines and charged with the costs of their arrests. With no means to pay such debts, prisoners were sold into coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroad construction crews and plantations. Others were simply seized by southern landowners and pressed into years of involuntary servitude.

At the turn of the 20th century, at least 3,464 African-American men and 130 women lived in forced labor camps in Georgia, according to a 1905 report by the federal Commissioner of Labor.