Pulitzer-Prize winning author Douglas A. Blackmon spoke at Nebraska Wesleyan University on Thursday, October 25 in a lecture titled, “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.”
Blackmon won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2009 for the book “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.” He is also the co-executive producer of the acclaimed PBS documentary of the same name. The documentary was broadcast in February 2012 and attracted an audience of 4.8 million viewers.
Blackmon’s book is a searing examination of how the enslavement of African-Americans persisted deep into the 20th century. “Slavery By Another Name” grew out of his 2001 article on slave labor in the Wall Street Journal. The article revealed the use of forced labor by dozens of U.S. corporations and commercial interests in coal mines, timber camps, factories and farms, beginning after the Civil War and continuing until the beginning of World War II.
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 where he was the Atlanta bureau chief and the paper’s senior national correspondent. He has written about or directed coverage of some of the most pivotal stories in American life, including the election of President Barack Obama, the rise of the tea party movement, and the BP oil spill.