PositiveThe Boston GlobeA virtual compendium of the death of Reconstruction and the rise of segregation and black disenfranchisement in what the historian Rayford Logan called the nadir of postbellum US race relations ... recounts the huge rise in vigilante violence, lynchings, assassinations, race riots (North and South), inflammatory oratory, laws, and court decisions that circumvented the Constitution and severely circumscribed the rights of African-Americans politically and economically. In some respects, this catalogue of the nadir is one of the book\'s weaknesses, since it sometimes departs from its account of peonage without much transition. Paying more attention to the considerable presence of involuntary servitude in African-American literature and intellectual history, reaching back to Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar, would have helped - though Blackmon does mention W.E.B. Du Bois\'s 1911 novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece ... Nonetheless, the book vividly and engagingly recalls the horror and sheer magnitude of such neo-slavery and reminds us how long after emancipation such practices persisted. It certainly provides insights on how we might regard the legacy of slavery, reparations, and perhaps even our justice and correctional system, with echoes for our own time.
