Sometimes my habit of ignoring television does deprive me of the opportunity to see something worthwhile. In this case, what I missed on PBS in 2008, came back around as an ebook in 2012.
The book itself longer than it needs to be and the author's writing style becomes tedious, which is unfortunate because the story is important. But that's why gawd made PBS documentaries, I guess.
By the way, unless you have read the book or seen the documentary, you might think this is just another history of Jim Crow laws and the hopeless misery of share cropping, but that's not the case. This is the story of illegal forced labor and peonage that existed in the south right up to the dawn of WWII.
The author takes exception to the common terminology of using "Jim Crow era" to describe this period because it is a deceptively tame and misleading description. He refers to it as the era of Neo-Slavery.
The author is not trying to make a claim for reparations from the responsible corporations, but he does make an interesting point. U.S. Steel is one corporation that benefited directly from the use of this slave labor. They also bought smaller companies in the south whose value was acquired through the use of slave labor. U.S. Steel consistently professes both ignorance of, and a lack of responsibility for, the practices of the companies they purchased. The author points out the hyprocrisy of American law which would hold US Steel responsible for any environmental pollution committed by companies it later acquired, but not for the slave labor on which they were built. He uses Wachovia Bank as a contrasting example of a corporation which has owned up to and apologized for its own past and the past of banks it has acquired and merged itself with over the years.
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