Burns Alumnus Doug Blackmon Receives Pulitzer
By Maia Curtis
Douglas Blackmon (Burns 1991) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in April for his book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II.
Blackmon is currently The Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau chief, and has worked for the paper since 1995. As bureau chief, he manages the paper’s coverage of major companies and institutions based in the southeastern U.S. He has also written extensively on race relations, including stories about the integration of schools during his childhood in the Mississippi Delta region and the connection between modern corporations and segregation.
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| Doug Blackmon at the Burns Alumni Dinner in Feb. 2008. |
Slavery by Another Name is his first book and explores how a new form of slavery continued to thrive long after its legal abolition at the end of the Civil War. Based on extensive research, Blackmon describes how government officials collaborated with private businesses to arrest African-Americans on arbitrary charges, and then “leased” them to corporations and landowners in involuntary servitude, ostensibly to pay off the fines for their “crimes” and arrests. These crimes included changing employers without permission, vagrancy or false pretense. As The New York Times review highlights, although a fine for “gaming” would be 10 days of work in a mine, “it would take an additional 104 days for him to pay fees to the sheriff, county clerk and witnesses who appeared at his trial.”
The conditions for these newly enslaved African-Americans were brutal and many did not survive their “lease.” Blackmon’s book identifies specific corporations and wealthy families who profited most from laws which were designed to “criminalize black life.” This neoslavery did not finally end until the 1940s.
The book has received outstanding reviews, and in its announcement, the Pulitzer Prize Board described the book as “a precise and eloquent work that examines a deliberate system of racial suppression and that rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity.”
The New York Times declares the book “relentless and fascinating” and Publishers Weekly calls it “groundbreaking and disturbing.”
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reviewer writes:
Slavery by Another Name is a formidably researched, powerfully written, wrenchingly detailed narrative of the mistreatment of millions of blacks in America, mistreatment that kept African-Americans in shackles of the body and mind long after slavery had officially ended.
The decades of "re-enslavement," Blackmon argues, must be taken into account when trying to assess the damage done to African-Americans by centuries of involuntary servitude.
"Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the U.S. must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945," he writes.
Atlanta Magazine also highlights this connection in its review:
In recent years, German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and Swiss bankers who robbed Holocaust victims of their fortunes have faced tough questions about what they owe the descendants of the people they wronged. In raising those same questions about prominent families in Atlanta, Birmingham, and beyond, Blackmon has probably wrecked any chance of being invited to join a country club. But he’s brought to light another sickening reminder of the insidious nature of prejudice.
This haunting book uncovers a largely unknown chapter of U.S. history and disputes the conventional wisdom that slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. As Charles J. Ogletree, Jr, executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School wrote, “Douglas Blackmon has written a book that covers largely uncharted grounds. While much has been written about the horrors of slavery, Blackmon’s well researched and powerfully written book reminds us of the ugly period on racial subjugation in America AFTER the end of slavery. This book adds a missing chapter in America’s troubled history on the issue of race, and should be required reading in every classroom in America.”