Reposted from the UALE mailing list:
As you may be aware, PBS broadcast a special 90-minute film Monday, Feb. 13, 9pm ET/PT, 8pm CT, in most cities, as part of Black History Month.
[KQED in San Francisco will broadcast at 10pm PT, and WTTW in Chicago at 9pm CT; below is a list of some larger media markets where the times are different.].
This film vividly presents the little-known story of thewidescale reimposition of actual slavery in the South, after Reconstruction, which reached its height in the early 20th Century and continued -- with its condoning by the US Dept. of Justice -- until Pearl Harbor. |The consequences for African-American families and communities in the South were horrific.This severe abuse represented a form of judicial, political and economic terrorism which still reverberates in American politics.The film concentrates on a few stories of the hundreds of thousands of African-American men dragged into the “convict-leasing system” – and assigned to coal mines, brick factories, farming and other industrial-sized enterprises, with murderous consequences for them and incredible profits for the corporations which used them. In coal mining, the slave labor system was explicitly used to stop one of the most important strikes in Southern history – the UMWA’s effort to stop convict leasing at the US Steel mines in Birmingham. That strike was smashed by the Alabama state militia in an incident every bit as brutal as the well-known incident in Ludlow, CO.
