Douglas A. Blackmon

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

Early life and education

Blackmon was born in Stuttgart, 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.

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 and in 2012 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.

Blackmon was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2009.

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.

Blackmon is currently the host and executive producer of American Forum, a weekly public affairs program produced in conjunction with the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs and broadcast on more than 100 PBS stations in the United States.