Based on a
vast record of original documents and personal narratives,
SLAVERY BY
ANOTHER NAME unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants
who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then
back into the shadow of involuntary servitude.
It also
reveals the stories of those who fought unsuccessfully against the
re-emergence of human labor trafficking, the modern companies that
profited most from neoslavery, and the system’s final demise in the
1940s, partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial
abuse at the beginning of World War II.
Over the past 20 years, Douglas A.
Blackmon has written extensively 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 have explored the interplay of wealth, corporate conduct and
racial segregation.
As The Wall Street Journal's bureau chief
in Atlanta, he manages the paper’s coverage of airlines and other major
transportation companies and publicly traded companies and institutions
based in the southeastern U.S. The bureau directly covers the Centers
for Disease Control, the World Health Organization, and more than 1,200
companies, including Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Bank of
America, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, United Parcel Service and FedEx. The
Journal staff in Atlanta also writes about key news and issues in the
11-state region.
Blackmon's stories or the work of his
team have been nominated by the Journal for Pulitzer Prizes four times,
including for coverage of the subprime meltdown, Hurricane Katrina in
2005, Florida hurricanes in 2004 and for his 2001 examination of slave
labor in the 20th century. His article on U.S. Steel was included in the
2003 edition of Best Business Stories. The Journal’s coverage of
Hurricane Katrina received a special National Headliner award in 2006.
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, and special assignments including the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Previously, he
was a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat, managing editor of the Daily
Record in Little Rock, Ark, and a writer for weekly newspapers.
Blackmon penned his first newspaper story
at the age of 12, for the Progress, in his hometown of Leland,
Mississippi. He graduated from Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., and
lives in Atlanta with his wife and two children.
