A judge. A psychologist. Two teachers. A college dean. One graduate student, one undergrad. A minister. A retired executive and more.

The Journal-Constitution last week assembled a remarkable group to discuss a remarkable book: "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II."

The new book documents a South unknown to many —- a place in which white sheriffs, politicians and businessmen got rich by enslaving thousands of black men for decades after emancipation. The process was simple and evil: Black men were arrested on a pretext, shunted through a rigged system and then chained like animals and sent to work off their sentences or debts in coal mines and steel mills and on plantations.

The AJC invited a group of readers to discuss the book and its implications with one another and with the author, Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas A. Blackmon. Deputy editorial page editor Jay Bookman moderated the three-hour session (which began as a two-hour session).

A 'devastating' look back

"At times, as I read different books, I have to pull away, because it makes me angry. And even now I can feel it —- it's not I-want-to-kill-the-white-man type angry —- it's why don't we use history to learn from? On both sides? There are blacks who don't want to use it, and there are whites who just want to omit it, as if it didn't exist. We don't use our history wisely."

—- Bill Rembert, high school teacher, Covington

"Sometimes when you're talking to friends, you say, 'What would you have done if you had been a slave?' And my comment usually was, 'I probably would have been killed. I probably couldn't have done it.' "

—- Peggy Martin, middle school principal, Cobb County

Book reveals 'terrible human costs'

These are excerpts from a discussion of the book "Slavery by Another Name," by Douglas A. Blackmon, involving the author, the AJC's Jay Bookman and 15 readers who visited the paper recently for a kind of "book club" conversation.

TRAGIC CONNECTIONS

In February 1920, the book reports, federal investigators visited the Jasper County farm of John S. Williams to ask him about charges made by an escaped worker that Williams was enslaving black men. A week later, the book says, Williams either participated in or presided over the murders of 11 leased convicts to conceal the slavery on his farm. His great-granddaughter, Susan Burnore, a recently retired IBM executive who lives in metro Atlanta, attended the AJC's discussion last week. Among her comments:

My great-grandfather was John S. Williams, who is pages 360 through 364 in Mr. Blackmon's book. He was one of the most egregious individual users of the peonage [system]. I grew up knowing that my great-grandfather —- he died before I was born —- had died in prison, and that he had died in prison for murdering a black man. But that's really the only truth that I knew. My family, of course, had a, no pun intended, whitewashed version of it that made it sound as if he wasn't really such a bad guy, he was just doing what was accepted at the time. So that's the story I heard, and it was always: "Well, things were different then, and he was a good man, and we just have to overlook that." Then, about 10 years ago, this book came out, "Lay This Body Down." ... It's just one very sad story. But the thing that makes it historically significant, and this absolutely shocked me, John S. Williams became the first white man to be convicted of murdering a black man since Reconstruction. That was in 1921. There was not another such conviction until 1960-something.

That was a devastating thing when this book was published for my family, because all of us of the later generations had accepted this whitewashed story. When this came out, my first thought was, "I'm so glad my grandmother isn't alive." She's in this book; she was at the trial. I can't tell you how devastating it was for us to read about people —- some of whom I knew and loved very much —- and the horrible things they did. Also, I was fascinated with the history of this. This [trial] became very much a political event in Georgia, and you would have thought it would change things forever, but it didn't.

Laura Lester, a retired elementary school principal and graduate student.

In 1833, my great-great-grandfather bought 10,000 acres —- "bought" —- from the Cherokees [in Polk County, Ga.]. I can remember seeing it as a child visiting, that farmland was divided up —- my mother and all her brothers and sisters inherited some of that 10,000 acres. I could never, ever recover from the fact that they had hundred-year-old shacks that African-American families were living in when I was a child, doing sharecropping.

Not only was the land literally stolen from the Cherokees. All the wealth that was derived from it was stolen from these African-American sharecropping families. They were paid absolutely nothing, just given the hundred-year-old shacks to live in and a mule to plow. So the history as it is reconstructed for me is such firm evidence that the present wealth of [many] whites in the South still derives from slave labor.

GROWING UP SOUTHERN

Douglas A. Blackmon is the author of "Slavery by Another Name."

In 1970, I entered the first grade and I was in the first class of children in Mississippi who began the first grade together —- black and white —- and went through 12 grades of education together.

I was just a little boy. But I knew that everybody was incredibly angry. The older black kids were all angry at me and I couldn't figure out why. The white kids I went to church with all were mad at me —- for the life of me I could not figure out why they were mad. And they didn't go to school with me. They went to this all-white private academy that was set up in the town. All the white kids were mad at the black kids and a lot of the blacks seemed to be mad at other blacks.

Everybody was just incredibly angry. That was sort of the defining recollection for me those early years. I started at a really early age asking, "Gee, why is everybody so mad at everybody?" In the beginning, my asking those questions mostly made people more angry because this was something that people really did not want to talk about.

THE REAL STORY

Cully Clark, a historian, is dean of Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.

There was a seminal article in 1949, by Fletcher Green, who was sort of the parent of what we call the conventional historiography on the subject. He said in the article that the only way to comprehend the convict-lease system was to turn to medieval persecution, to Nazi forced-labor camps and to the Siberian experience in Soviet Russia.

So there's been an awareness for a very long time among historians of how brutal the system was, but this is the first full book-length treatment that puts it under a microscope and lets you see the terrible human costs.

Alma McCray is a social studies teacher in Atlanta.

I came here 2 1/2 years ago from Charlotte. Thirty years ago, someone told me, "Oh, Charlotte wasn't really into slavery." And I'm like, "Excuse me? What happened, they just jumped right over Charlotte and went to South Carolina?" So I started doing a little bit of research, and I was really interested in what happened to former slaves after slavery.

And I found that slavery just continued, just as this gentleman wrote, in another form, under a new name. And his book for me answered a lot of questions. For example, I just couldn't believe the government would pull out the Union troops and leave the former slaves totally at the mercy of the slaveholders.

Peggy Martin is principal of a Cobb County middle school.

I really appreciated the way the author made me feel what was going on. I could just feel it. It was horrible. And also, it has given me such a deeper respect for Martin Luther King and some of the others. If this was going on, now I can understand that they were really fighting a battle bigger than I realized.

REPARATIONS

Marty Duren is a Southern Baptist pastor in Buford.

I don't know about any of the other white folks here. There's a lone echo of slavery in my family that I know of. My great-great —- some number of greats —- grandfather was killed by one of his slaves. I've always felt that he probably deserved it. ... The whole concept of reparations is so misunderstood. Nobody knows where the money would come from, nobody knows who would get the money. There is so little clarity as to how that would be effected, it disallows serious conversation as to whether it can happen or not.

Muhammad Yungai is a writer and activist in Atlanta.

What you just said is reflective of what I was saying earlier: Most white people don't have any idea what's going on in the black community. I've been involved in various groups, been involved in N'COBRA —- the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America. There is a very detailed, reasonable, laid-out plan by many black thinkers and scholars about reparations, where the money would come from, who it would go to. And it's not necessarily just money. One of the ideas was to take people coming out of prison and train and re-educate them and reintegrate them back into society.

Douglas A. Blackmon.

[European courts were turning aside cases in which German companies were sued for their roles in Nazi Germany. Blackmon notes that the U.S. passed a law in the late 1990s enabling those plaintiffs to file their cases in American courts.]

Any company that could be connected to something like that and also had operations in the United States could be sued in American courts.

And so an avenue was created by America for raising all these issues, even though —- as leaped out at me —- we're a country that has never been willing to open such avenues for our own citizens about our own conduct.

And so I just sort of said: "Well, gee, what would happen if we looked at ourselves through the same lens that we insist other countries look at themselves through?"

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Muhammad Yungai.

Right now, one out of nine black men are somehow involved in the criminal justice system. And it's not just because there are a bunch of black criminals running in the streets. As we read in the book, the goal posts change. This is not against the law, but if a black man does it, all of a sudden it is against the law. And then, poor, powerless people don't have any recourse when they go to court. Sometimes, when I'm joking with people, I say, "You've got about the same chance as a black man in Mississippi in 1930." Because when you walk into that courtroom, you are automatically guilty. A lot of that was carried on today.

Gail Tusan is a Fulton County Superior Court judge.

[She talks about the fact that, in nearly 100 years in Georgia, only one white man was prosecuted for the murder of a black man. Racial inequities are still with us, Tusan says.] You see that all the time with jury verdicts. The color of the victim vs. the color of the defendant —- it's just so deeply embedded that, it isn't a hopeless situation, but many times it almost feels that way.

And when you are an African-American on the bench, the assumption is that your being on the bench is going to cure all the problems embedded in the criminal justice system. And obviously that's not the case. But I think it's better to come into a courtroom and see that there's someone up there who has had some of the experiences that [the defendant] has had.

Jonathan Grant is a writer of fiction and nonfiction from DeKalb County.

One of the problems with the death penalty is that it has its roots many times in lynching. You'll see that the lynching states of yore are oftentimes the hard-core death penalty states of today, and you can also see the demographic profiles of victims and perpetrators, and which lives are valued more, and what higher penalties are extracted depending on the color of the skin, even today. ... In the early 1990s, in Georgia's four youth prisons, all 110 inmates serving time for drugs were black. What's interesting about that is, look at drug usage among the youth. White boys use more drugs than anybody else. And then it's black boys, and then it's white girls, and then it's black girls. So what you see as a medical problem out in the suburbs becomes a crime problem in the inner cities.

BLACK FAMILIES

Pam Thompson is a psychologist in Atlanta.

A good many of my clients are African-American women who are struggling with their singleness and their limited choices in relationships. Finding a compatible mate has become a phenomenon that is really pervasive throughout the community and has changed the dynamics between African-American men and women.

Women are so alone, and so tired, and so headstrong, because they've been raised to be men. I came from a time when the parents of all my friends were married. In fact, it was an anomaly when I met somebody whose parents were divorced. And now here we are, and we see that hardly anybody is married anymore. [That has created great] harshness of life for women. And that harshness is transferred to our children. I can't tell you how many times I've been in the grocery store, or just out in public somewhere, and have seen a black mother literally curse her child out, because there's so much harshness to her world, where she is trying to survive, and be a man and be a woman.

So when I was reading the book, I saw generations and generations of black men, heads of households, lost, and what that did to the men and women of today, and how the reference point for what it is to have a man in the household was completely lost.

Black women, and I'm speaking in very general terms, have a tendency to relegate the role of manhood as nonessential. The young girls that I see in group homes, who are in the DFACS system, when I ask them about their dreams and goals for the future, not once does marriage ever come up. They aspire to have children, but not once do I hear them say, "And one day I'm going to get married."

Excerpts from reviews of Blackmon's 'Slavery'

These are excerpts from two reviews of "Slavery by Another Name" —- one from the New York Times Book Review, and one that ran in AJC's Arts & Books section last Sunday.

From the Times' Janet Maslin:

Author Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerates one of our schoolchildren's most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the Civil War. Blackmon unearths shocking evidence that the practice persisted well into the 20th century. [Maslin complains that the book starts slowly, speculating about an enslaved man about whom few records exist.]

But as soon as it gets to more verifiable material, "Slavery by Another Name" becomes relentless and fascinating. It exposes what has been a mostly unexplored aspect of American history (though there have been dissertations and a few books from academic presses). It creates a broad racial, economic, cultural and political backdrop for events that have haunted Mr. Blackmon and will now haunt us all. And it need not exaggerate the hellish details of intense racial strife.

The torment that Mr. Blackmon catalogs is, if anything, understated here. But it loudly and stunningly speaks for itself.

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From Steve Suitts, for the Journal-Constitution:

The genius of Blackmon's book is that it illuminates both the real human tragedy and the profoundly corrupting nature of the Old South slavery as it transformed to establish a New South social order.

The book, nonetheless, suffers occasionally from more ambitions than it can deliver. In portraying legal enslavement through personal stories, the book jumps a little too much from place to place, story to story, back and forth in time with a multitude of characters, digressions and family members. Among other things, the reader must keep up with "who is who" among almost 40 members of the Cottenham family (spelled three different ways).

In giving real flesh and blood to its narrative, "Slavery by Another Name" appears in a few places to go beyond its sources in describing personal characteristics and motives based only on bare-bones government and census records. The book's subtitle also overreaches since, in fact, the work analyzes patterns of enslavement only through the 1920s, not to World War II.