Douglas Blackmon

 

Selected Resources for Douglas Blackmon

Douglas A. Blackmon’s first book, “Slavery By Another Name”, broadly examines how a form of neoslavery thrived in the U.S. long after legal abolition.   2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Wall Street Journal writer Douglas Blackmon. Slavery by Another Name challenges one of our country’s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The documentary recounts how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, keeping hundreds of thousands of African Americans in bondage, trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until the onset of World War II.  Based on Blackmon’s research into original documents and personal narratives, Slavery by Another Name unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after Emancipation and then back into involuntary servitude. It also tells stories of courage and redemption, and the men and women who fought against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking.

The website about the book, gives an excerpt and the introduction for the book. http://www.slaverybyanothername.com/the-book/excerpt/

The book that can be read online, although only about 90 pages are shown with some pages missing within the preview. http://books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&vid=ISBN9780385506250&vid=ISBN0385506252&vid=LCCN2007034500#v=onepage&q&f=false

N. Gordon Carper, Slavery Revisited: Peonage in the South, Phylon (1960-), Vol. 37, No. 1 (1st Qtr., 1976), pp. 85-99.  A scholarly article which addresses many issues associated with labor laws, the legal system and a cultural climate that successfully maintained pre-Civil War slave conditions. There were several laws which created conditions of peonage throughout the South, the "Black Codes" and the contract labor laws were the most popularly used instruments.  Throughout the South the convict-lease system directly led to and brought about peonage.  Both the Black Codes and the contract labor laws supported the tendency in the South to weave about ignorant black laborers a legal system which would guarantee not only second-class citizenship for blacks but which would force them into complete economic dependence upon the will of the white land owners and employers.  The climate of opinion which fostered peonage in the South and which made it a predominantly black institution resulted from a series of historical events.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/274733

An interview with the author.  The Untold History of Post-Civil War 'Neoslavery', NPR March 25, 2008.  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89051115  Accessed Nov 17, 2011. 

“Slavery’s Last Chapter”, Newsweek, Jul 13, 2008 8:00 PM EDT Long after the Civil War's final shots were fired, hundreds of thousands of African-Americans were held captive and forced to work hard labor without compensation.  A new book tells their stories. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/07/14/slavery-s-last-chapter.html Accessed Nov 17.

A Persistent Past: Reckoning with Racial History in the Era of Obama, A Lecture by Douglas Blackmon, MP3 podcast. http://www.libs.uga.edu/russell/media.html. Accessed Nov 17, 2011

“Buried in Alabama – Slavery”, Catherine Williams & Douglas A. Blackmon video piece about Slavery By Another Name Book.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlmCa0LtNr8 Accessed Nov 17, 2011.

“20th Century Slavery in Mississippi and Louisiana”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KZrf8sh48g&feature=related  Accessed Nov 17, 2011.  Many African American were held in peonage throughout the deep south. Under peonage they could not leave the plantations or farms. Their lives were threaten some were murder for trying to leave. Yes, some may not believe that this could be possible in the 20th century. Throughout the state of Mississippi, in many deep rural area there was no way out for thousand who were trapped in this new slavery called peonage.

 Sample Assignment - Douglas Blackmon

Short essay responding to one of the following prompts:

• What is the connection between the end of neoslavery and the beginning of World War II?
• According to Blackmon’s research, several companies including U.S. Steel and Georgia Power Co. were directly responsible for capitalizing off of African-American slave labor.  Present a cogent argument for or against requiring reparations to be issued to descendants of these laborers.