Slavery by Another Name (2012)
Slavery by Another Name is a documentary film By Sam Pollard, Catherine Allan, Douglas Blackmon and Sheila Curran Bernard who released in 2012. Based on a prize-winning book by the journalist Douglas A. Blackmon this film tells how thousands of African Americans were dragged back into forced labor with surprising force and cruelty when chattel slavery came to an end in the South between the civil war and World War II.
Plot
It was a shocking reality that often went unacknowledged, then and now: A huge system of forced, unpaid labor, mostly affecting Southern black men, that lasted until World War II. Based on the Pulitzer-Prize-winning book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name tells the stories of men, charged with crimes like vagrancy, and often guilty of nothing, who were bought and sold, abused, and subject to sometimes deadly working conditions as unpaid convict labor. Interviews with the descendants of victims and perpetrators resonate with a modern audience. Christina Comer, who discovered how her family profited from the system, comments that “the story is important no matter how painful the reality is.”[1]
Controversy
The documentary depict how black people were forced to labor againts their will and not free yet even though at that time black people is no longer a slave and trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until the onset of World War II. Free black people could just be caught and put in prison and the sheriff department could sell them to a coal mining company. "People's lives were truly stolen from them, their freedom was taken away". [2]
Blacks people who were convicted of crimes, no matter how lenient or just the theft of a pig worth more than $1, they are often given long sentences and are available for mines, farms and factories. "The practice was brutal. About a third of prisoner mine workers in Alabama coal mines died every year."[3]

