I just finished watching Bill Moyers interview Douglas Blackmon of the Wall Street Journal (video and transcript), and it's pretty disturbing--we've all heard of Jim Crow laws, lynching and segregation, but those words don't begin to scratch the surface. For as many blacks as could be rounded up in many Southern states, slavery was reinstated after the Union troops went home, right into the 1940s.

This picture was taken in a labor camp in 1932:


From the interview:

"The judicial system, the law enforcement system of the South became primarily an instrument of coercing people into labor and intimidating blacks away from their civil rights. That was its primary purpose, not the punishment of lawbreakers." Douglas Blackmon