Your Favorite Blockhead!

Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Slavery by Another Name provides a sturdy contention, that the final demise of the system in the 1940’s was due partly to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse being used as a weapon against America at the beginning of World War II. Blackmon writes, “Millions of soldiers – black and white – had witnessed the horror of racial ideology exalted to its most violent extremes in Nazi Germany. Thousands of African American men who returned as fighting men, unwilling to capitulate again to the docile state of helplessness that preceded the war, abandoned the South altogether or joined in the agitation that would become the civil rights movement…It was a strange irony that after seventy-four years of hollow emancipation, the final delivery of African Americans from overt slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors perpetuated by an enemy coun