BiblioVault - Books about Chain Gang

The Chain Gang

One Newspaper versus the Gannett Empire

Richard McCord

University of Missouri Press, 2001

"They're closing in on me, Dick, and I'm afraid they're going to get me," said Frank Wood, publisher of the Green Bay News-Chronicle, in a phone call to his friend and colleague, Richard McCord. Drained of cash and spirit, Wood could not hold out much longer against a devouring giant, the Gannett Company. As editor and publisher of the nationally distinguished weekly Santa Fe Reporter, McCord had successfully fended off Gannett's "Operation Demolition" when it moved into town. Now Wood was seeking the help of a survivor.

Startling case histories of the dubious tactics practiced by Gannett, unsparing insights into the newspaper industry, and harsh conclusions all come together in the dramatic story of these two men's efforts to save the small Green Bay daily from being obliterated at the hands of the nation's largest newspaper chain. Their success is a metaphor for one of the oldest triumphs of the world: that of David over Goliath.

"McCord has done something marvelous with this. He's taken a deeply disturbing nationwide trend and put it on a small midwestern stage with real characters. The Chain Gang's message needs to be heard by as many Americans as read newspapers. Already Gannett's monopoly tactics have impoverished communities across the country. McCord is one man fighting back, coolly, rationally, creatively, and stubbornly. Let's join him."—Michael Shnayerson, Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair

"More graphically than almost any other available record of the era, the Gannett piracy is what has happened to this country, tolled where the price is truly paid, in the lives of communities and people."—Roger Morris, winner of the Investigative Reporters and Editors' National Award for Distinguished Investigative Journalism

"Richard McCord's The Chain Gang takes the losing battle for the soul of American newspapers from the euphoric accounts on financial pages to show what corporate news chains can mean in human terms to the people and the vitality of the victimized cities and towns. His is a unique account of the power and depredations of the Gannett Chain under its glib empire builder, Allen Neuharth. It goes behind the facade of slick public relations and financial killings for investors to show what happens when a ruthless and ambitious wheeler-dealer gets control of our news."—Ben H. Bagdikian, media critic and Pulitzer Prize winner

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I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang

Edited, with an introduction by John E. O'Connor; Tino T. Balio, Series Editor

University of Wisconsin Press, 1981

Since its release in 1932, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang had earned a reputation as one of the few Hollywood products that can be associated directly with social change. Film historians attribute the reform of the southern chain gang system to the public outrage generated by this movie, which depicts a true story.
In addition to being an important social document, the film remains a gripping experience for filmgoers today because of its unusual dramatic conception, its hauntingly inconclusive ending, and Paul Muni's performance as the good boy forced to go wrong.

This book includes the complete screenplay.

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Slaves of the State

Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary

Dennis Childs

University of Minnesota Press, 2015

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed in 1865, has long been viewed as a definitive break with the nation’s past by abolishing slavery and ushering in an inexorable march toward black freedom. Slaves of the State presents a stunning counterhistory to this linear narrative of racial, social, and legal progress in America.

Dennis Childs argues that the incarceration of black people and other historically repressed groups in chain gangs, peon camps, prison plantations, and penitentiaries represents a ghostly perpetuation of chattel slavery. He exposes how the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause—allowing for enslavement as “punishment for a crime”—has inaugurated forms of racial capitalist misogynist incarceration that serve as haunting returns of conditions Africans endured in the barracoons and slave ship holds of the Middle Passage, on plantations, and in chattel slavery.

Childs seeks out the historically muted voices of those entombed within terrorizing spaces such as the chain gang rolling cage and the modern solitary confinement cell, engaging the writings of Toni Morrison and Chester Himes as well as a broad range of archival materials, including landmark court cases, prison songs, and testimonies, reaching back to the birth of modern slave plantations such as Louisiana’s “Angola” penitentiary.

Slaves of the State paves the way for a new understanding of chattel slavery as a continuing social reality of U.S. empire—one resting at the very foundation of today’s prison industrial complex that now holds more than 2.3 million people within the country’s jails, prisons, and immigrant detention centers.

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Workin' on the Chain Gang

Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History

Walter Mosley

University of Michigan Press, 2006

A passionate examination of the social and economic injustices that continue to shackle the American people

Praise for Workin’ on the Chain Gang:

“. . . bracing and provocative. . . .”

—Publishers Weekly

“. . . clear-sighted . . . Mosley offers chain-breaking ideas. . . .”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“[A] thoroughly potent dismantling of Yanqui capitalism, the media, and the entertainment business, and at the same time a celebration of rebellion, truth as a tool for emancipation, and much else besides. . . .”

—Toronto Globe and Mail

“Workin’ on the Chain Gang excels at expressing feelings of ennui that transcend race. . . . beautiful language and penetrating insights into the necessity of confronting the past.”

—Washington Post

“Mosley eloquently examines what liberation from consumer capitalism might look like. . . . readers receptive to a progressive critique of the religion of the market will value Mosley’s creative contribution.”

—Booklist

Walter Mosley’s most recent essay collection is Life Out of Context, published in 2006. He is the best-selling author of the science fiction novel Blue Light, five critically acclaimed mysteries featuring Easy Rawlins, the blues novel RL’s Dream, a finalist for the NAACP Award in Fiction, and winner of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Literary Award. His books have been translated into twenty languages. He lives in New York.

Clyde Taylor is Professor of Africana Studies at NYU’s Gallatin School and author of The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aesthetic Contract—Film and Literature.

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