The Pulitzer-Prize winning book by Douglas Blackmon Slavery By Another Name (Doubleday, 2008), has also become a documentary film (and Sundance Film Festival selection). SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME is a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans' most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. [22] Blackmon said of the officials' actions that "The idea that a book like mine is somehow incendiary or a call to violence is so absurd".[23]. The crime waves that occurred by and large were the aftermath of the war and whites coming back from fighting in the Civil War and settling scores with people and all sorts of renegade activity that didn't involve black people at all, but they were blamed for it, and that was then used as a kind of ruse for why these incredibly brutal new legal measures then began to be put in place. Douglas Blackmon is a Wall Street Journal reporter. Slavery by Another Name follows the life of Green Cottenham who was arrested on March 30, 1908 by the sheriff of Selby County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy” and in walking in his footsteps author Blackmon shared what he’d learned about the politics of the day and how those politics and slavery were synonymous then as they are today. EMBED (for wordpress.com hosted blogs and archive.org item tags) Want more? X. Interviews with the descendants of victims and perpetrators resonate with a modern audience. In 2009, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. Watch the 90-minute film about slavery after the Civil War. The film, Slavery By Another Name, explores a system of forced labor that brutalized many black Southerners up to World War II. It was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality. The resulting book was well received by critics and became a New York Times Best Seller. [11] Joseph E. Brown, former governor of Georgia, amassed great wealth based on his use of convict labor in his Dade Coal Company mines and other enterprises, from 1874 to 1894. [2] It explores the forced labor of prisoners, overwhelmingly African American men, through the convict lease system used by states, local governments, white farmers, and corporations after the American Civil War until World War II in the southern United States. In "Slavery by Another Name" Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerates one of our schoolchildren's most basic assumptions: that slavery in America … "[26], Daniel Fienberg of Hitfix, viewing the film at Sundance, wrote, Slavery By Another Name is sturdy and well-researched stuff and it will play well when it airs on PBS next month and it should play well in the future in classrooms, but as a film festival entry, it isn't nearly confident enough in its artistry. Directed by Sam Pollard. Slavery By Another Name (2012), a new documentary based on Douglas Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction book about insidious forms of forced labor that emerged in the American South following the Civil War, will be screened on Friday, February 3, 2012 at 7:00 p.m. in the Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. "[19], African American Studies scholar James Smethurst was more critical, writing in The Boston Globe that "this catalogue of the nadir is one of the book's weaknesses, since it sometimes departs from its account of peonage without much transition. Host Michel Martin speaks with the film… In the book's epilogue, Blackmon argues for the importance of acknowledging this history of forced labor: [T]he evidence moldering in county courthouses and the National Archives compels us to confront this extinguished past, to recognize the terrible contours of the record, to teach our children the truth of a terror that pervaded much of American life, to celebrate its end, to lift any shame on those who could not evade it. Buy Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II Illustrated by Blackmon, Douglas A (ISBN: 0000385722702) from Amazon's Book Store. A 20-minute classroom version with curriculum materials is also available. I cannot recommend it to you highly enough. PARK CITY — Digging into a chapter in the African-American saga that history books have traditionally glossed over, Sam Pollard 's Slavery By Another Name … In this epic research and media project, Blackmon and his collaborators bring to light a period of time when slavery had officially ended, yet a new form of was being reinstated. He grew up in Washington County, Mississippi, where as a seventh grader he was encouraged by his teacher and his mother to research a local racist incident, despite the opposition of some citizens. He aptly, and carefully, draws parallels between the corporate responsibility of companies that exploited slave labor in Nazi Germany and that of southerners who bought convict labor. With Laurence Fishburne, Turron Kofi Alleyne, Douglas A. Blackmon, Melvin J Cox. Neil Genzliger of The New York Times wrote of the film that "by filling in an overlooked part of black history, this sobering film enhances our understanding of why race issues have proved so intractable. Slavery by Another Name began as an article which Blackmon wrote for The Wall Street Journal detailing the use of black forced labor by U.S. Steel Corporation. See the full film at http://video.pbs.org/video/2176766758SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME The experience began a lifelong interest in the history of American race relations.[3]. For most Americans this is entirely new history. Based on Douglas A. Blackmon's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the film illuminates how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, persisting until the onset of World War II. 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