Douglas A. Blackmon

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Douglas A. Blackmon

Douglas A. Blackmon (born September 6, 1964 in Stuttgart , Arkansas ) is an American writer and journalist whose non-fiction book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II in 2009 with was awarded the Pulitzer Prize .

Youth and education

Blackmon was born in Arkansas and grew up in Leland in the Lower Mississippi Delta region . The population of the town, which had only about 10,000 inhabitants, consisted of white and half of colored people, while in the district the majority of the inhabitants were colored. As a seventh grader, encouraged by his teacher and mother, he researched a local incident of racism for a history essay. Despite negative reactions from some adults to his research work, according to his own statements, this justified a continuing interest in the relationship between whites and colored people in US history. After graduating from high school, he went to Hendrix College .

Professional career

Blackmon first worked as a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat and then as an editor for the Daily Record , both of which are based in Little Rock . Blackmon later moved to Atlanta, where he worked as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution .

He started working for The Wall Street Journal in 1995 and has headed the Atlanta office since 2012. In 2003, Blackmon described the use of black slave labor in the US Steel coal mines in an article. The article met with a wide response and was included in an anthology of the best economic articles in 2003. Blackmon then began to conduct extensive research on the subject. Originally, he wanted to tell the life story of Green Cottenham, who was arrested and convicted in 1908 on the basis of the presumably fabricated allegation of vagrancy, had to do forced labor under the convict lease system in a US Steel coal mine and was killed in the process. However, Blackmon was unable to find sufficient sources on the case. In the course of his research, however, he noticed the numerous arrests and convictions of blacks, which suggested that there were numerous cases comparable to that of Green Cottenham. Instead, he processed his research in the book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II , for which he received the Pulitzer Prize the following year. The book is also the basis of a documentary that was shot for PBS in 2011 .

Publications

  • Douglas A. Blackmon: Slavery by Another Name: The re-enslavement of black americans from the civil war to World War Two , Icon Books, London 2012, ISBN 978-1-84831-413-9

Web links

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Blackmon: Slavery by Another Name . 2012, p. 404 and p. 405
  2. ^ Curriculum vitae on the website Slavery by Another Name , accessed on December 28, 2013
  3. ↑ PBS Introduction to Documentation Based on Blackmon's Film , accessed December 28, 2013
  4. ↑ Interview with Blackmon in MPRNews , accessed December 28, 2013
  5. ↑ Interview with Blackmon in MPRNews , accessed December 28, 2013
personal data
SURNAME Blackmon, Douglas A.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1964
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart , Arkansas