The Agitator's Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African American Family (review)

J U L Y 2 0 0 9 213 orbitant fees associated with his arrest, trial, and subsequent imprisonment , his term was extended. His labor was then sold to the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation) where, according to the author, he labored for the remainder of his short life. Deprived of the right to due process, Cottenham and other black prisoners who performed hard labor for American corporations perished, “dead of disease, accidents, or homicide” (p. 2). Blackmon also examines the efforts of the federal government to jettison or purge laws that sanctioned such labor practices—efforts that were met with strong rebuke from southerners invested in maintaining a form of the master/slave dichotomy. Labor camps or the convict lease system survived in Alabama for five decades. The institution’s slow death finally came with World War II and America’s desire to conceal its hypocrisy. Involuntary servitude stood at odds with notions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as well as due process, and it illuminated the racial dimension of the country’s forced labor systems. Blackmon’s prose makes for an easily readable text that seamlessly weaves together a complete narrative (complete in part because of the author’s use of conjecture). The book does have its weaknesses. For instance , Blackmon argues that scholars have neglected the topic and reduced the convict lease system to a general narrative on postwar labor issues, ignoring a number of dissertations and published works that have grappled with the complexity of this issue. Matthew Mancini’s One Dies, Get Another (Columbia, S.C., 1996), Alex Lichtenstein’s Twice the Work of Free Labor (New York, 1995), and David Oshinsky’s Worse Than Slavery (New York, 1996) provide important scholarship on the topic. Nevertheless, Blackmon’s book provides fruitful insight into a system that restricted and shaped freedom for an untold number of black Americans. For that reason, Slavery by Another Name should occupy space on the bookshelf of labor historians and students of American history, as well as a wider audience interested in postbellum transformations. SHARITA JACOBS THOMPSON Gettysburg College The Agitator’s Daughter: A Memoir of Four Generations of One Extraordinary African American Family. By Sheryll Cashin. New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2008. $26.00. ISBN 978-1-58648-422-4. Sheryll Cashin has given her second book, The Agitator’s Daughter, an ambiguous title. She clearly is the “agitator’s daughter,” but the book is T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 214 neither biography nor autobiography. The subtitle, “a memoir of four generations of one extraordinary African-American family,” indicates that Sheryll Cashin will attempt to provide context for her life with this patrilineal family memoir. Instead, The Agitator’s Daughter is King Lear told from the viewpoint of Goneril. The tale begins pleasantly enough, with Herschel V. Cashin, the author ’s great grandfather. Cashin moved to Alabama during his twenties and became a lawyer and a Reconstruction-era state legislator. After 1877, he led a successful drive for free public education for African American youth in Decatur. Cashin was a “Black and Tan,” a member of the integrated faction of the Republican Party in the state, and an at-large delegate at the party’s national conventions from 1896 to 1904. Sheryll Cashin continues her family history with the stories of Herschel Cashin’s children, the most notable of whom was her great uncle Newlyn, who testified for the defense at the Scottsboro Boys’ second trial. His bold action resulted in the 1935 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Norris v. Alabama that the state of Alabama systematically excluded Negro “men of intelligence ” from jury service solely because of their race. Several other family members appear in early chapters and entreacte, and again, the author’s recounting of their stories is amiable. Family lore was drilled into Sheryll Cashin, who repeats and attempts to contextualize the legends. Dr. and Mrs. John Cashin Sr. raised Sheryll Cashin’s father with sternness but also with every possible advantage and sense of personal entitlement that a wealthy African American young man...