Douglas A. Blackmon is the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Slavery
by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to
World War II, and co-executive producer of the acclaimed PBS documentary of
the same name. His is also a contributing editor at The Washington Post and
chair and host of Forum, a public affairs program produced by the
University of Virginia’s Miller Center and aired on more than 100 PBS
affiliates across the U.S.
His book, a searing examination of
how the enslavement of African-Americans persisted deep into the 20th
century, was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The Slavery
by Another Name documentary was broadcast in February 2012 and attracted an
audience of 4.8 million viewers.
Until joining the Washington Post in
2011, Blackmon was the longtime chief of The Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta
bureau 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. Overseeing coverage of 11 southeastern states
for the Journal, he and his team of reporters were responsible for the
Journal’s acclaimed coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the failed federal
response after that disaster, the Journal’s investigation into the training and
preparations of the 9/11 hijackers in Florida, immigration, poverty, politics
and daily reporting on more than 2,500 corporations based in the region.
As a writer and editor at large,
Blackmon more recently led the Journal’s coverage of the tea party and the
final hours before the BP oil spill—for which he and a team of other Journal
writers were finalists for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.
Those stories received a Gerald Loeb Award in June 2011.
Blackmon has written extensively
over the past 25 years about the American quandary of race–exploring the
integration of schools during his childhood in a Mississippi Delta farm town,
lost episodes of the Civil Rights movement, and, repeatedly, the dilemma of how
a contemporary society should grapple with a troubled past. Many of his stories
in The Wall Street Journal explored the interplay of wealth, corporate conduct,
the American judicial system, and racial segregation. International assignments
have included the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the reunification of East
and West Germany, the Civil War in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, post apartheid
South Africa and the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague.
Political assignments have included the inauguration of President Barack
Obama in 2008, presidential campaigns of 1988, 2002, 2008, and 2012, the post
presidency of Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton while governor of Arkansas in the
1980s.
Blackmon is also a co-founder and
board member of two socially and ethnically diverse charter schools serving
more than 600 students, including his own two children, in grades kindergarten
through eight in the inner city of Atlanta.
In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Slavery
by Another Name was a New York Times bestseller in both hardback and soft
cover editions, and was awarded a 2009 American Book Award, the 2009
Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters non-fiction book prize, a 2008
Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Award, the
NAACP Freedom Fund Outstanding Achievement Award, and many other citations. He
has been honored by the state legislature of Georgia for distinguished
scholarship and service to history. In 2010, he received the Grassroots Justice
Award from the Georgia Justice Project.
The documentary film based on Slavery
by Another Name was directed by distinguished filmmaker Sam Pollard, with
more than $1.5 million in funding from the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and major corporate sponsors.
Blackmon is a much sought after
lecturer on race, history and social memory. In Spring 2010, he was
invited by Attorney General Eric Holder to present a lecture to senior
Department of Justice of officials in Washington D.C. He also has
lectured at Harvard School of Law, Yale University, Princeton, the New School,
Emory University, Vanderbilt School of Law, the Clinton and Lincoln
presidential libraries, and many other institutions.
The Journal’s coverage of Hurricane
Katrina received a special National Headliner award in 2006. In 2000, the
National Association of Black Journalists honored Blackmon for his stories
revealing the secret role of J.P. Morgan & Co. during the 1960s in
funneling funds to opponents of the Civil Rights Movement.
Prior to his work at The Wall Street
Journal, Blackmon covered race and politics at the Atlanta Journal Constitution
for seven years. His reporting on corruption at Atlanta City Hall in the 1990s
helped lead to the conviction and imprisonment of eight city officials,
including two former councilmen and the city’s chief investment officer.
Slavery by Another Name grew out of his 2001 article on slave labor in The Wall
Street Journal. It revealed the use of forced labor by dozens of U.S.
corporations and commercial interests in coal mines, timber camps, factories
and farms in cities and states across the South, beginning after the Civil War
and continuing until the beginning of World War II.
Janet Maslin wrote in the New York
Times that the book is “relentless and fascinating” and “will now haunt us
all.” New York University Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Levering Lewis
says the book reveals “an America holocaust that dare not speak its name, a
rivetingly written, terrifying history of six decades of racial degradation in
the service of white supremacy.” Bill Moyers called Slavery by Another Name
“brilliant” reporting. Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer winning editorial page
editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote that Slavery by Another Name
“illuminates … an ignominious economic system that depended on coerced labor
and didn’t flinch from savagery toward fellow human beings. Blackmon’s
exhaustive reportage should put an end to the oft-repeated slander that black
Americans tend toward lawlessness.”
Blackmon joined the Journal in
October 1995 as a reporter in Atlanta. Prior to joining the Journal, Blackmon
was a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution where he covered race and
politics in Atlanta. Previously, he was a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat in
1986-1987, and co-owner and managing editor of the Daily Record from 1987 to
1989, both in Little Rock, Ark.
Raised in Leland, Miss., Blackmon
penned his first newspaper story for the weekly Leland Progress at the age of
12. He received his degree in English from Hendrix College in Conway, Ark.
He lives in downtown Atlanta and Charlottesville, Va.
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