Douglas A. Blackmon

Douglas A. Blackmon
Born	1964 USA
Occupation	Journalist
Notable work(s)	Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Douglas A. Blackmon (born 1964) is an American writer, journalist and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2009 for his book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

It was adapted by PBS as a documentary film by the same name, shown in February 2012 and available for viewing at its website.

Early life and education

Blackmon was born in Arkansas and grew up in Leland, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta. He has said that the small town of 10,000 was split evenly between blacks and whites; the county and area, one of plantations, was majority black. It was the site of a plantation strike among black laborers, leading to extensive civil rights activity in the mid-twentieth century. He graduated from Hendrix College. Blackmon currently lives in Georgia with his wife and two children.

Journalism career

Blackmon first worked as a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat and as the managing editor of the Daily Record, both in Little Rock. He later moved to Atlanta, where he worked as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In 1995, he began working for The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). As of 2012 Blackmon became its Atlanta bureau chief.

In 2008, Blackmon published Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, which explored the history of peonage and convict lease labor in the South after the American Civil War. He revealed the stories of tens of thousands of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude, which lasted into the 20th century. It is based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives.

Blackmon was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2009; the Pulitzer committee called Blackmon's book "a precise and eloquent work that examines a deliberate system of racial suppression and that rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity."

Slavery by Another Name, a documentary film based on Blackmon's book, was aired February 13, 2012 on PBS stations. It can be viewed in its entirety on the PBS website.

Family

Blackmon has a wife and two children, to whom his book is dedicated. He also has two older brothers.

University of Virginia

Blackmon now teaches Public Intellectuals in the Media at the University of Virginia.