Fresh Loaf

Doug Blackmon, the Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau chief, can now add a Pulitzer Prize to his long list of accomplishments.

Blackmon today was named the general non-fiction award winner for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

The critically acclaimed book revealed the difficult lives of thousands of former slaves who were thrust into a brutally unfair world of forced labor and physical torture — decades after American slavery supposedly ended.

Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of “free” black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

Pulitzer judges called Blackmon’s book “a precise and eloquent work that examines a deliberate system of racial suppression and that rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity.”

Congrats, Doug. Well deserved.

(Book cover image courtesy Doubleday)

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As Mara Shalhoup reported last week in Fresh Loaf, Wall Street Journal Atlanta bureau chief Doug Blackmon will appear Wednesday Tuesday at Manuel’s Tavern (6-9 p.m.) to promote his critically acclaimed book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. This, on the heels of Blackmon’s book creeping onto the New York Times Bestseller List.

To get psyched up for the appearance, here’s a video of Blackmon’s appearance on the always-excellent PBS show “Bill Moyers Journal,” which also includes on the link a full transcript of the interview if you’d like to read instead of watch. Here’s a key exchange, about Atlanta’s role in all of this (thanks to John Otte on ArtNews) …

BILL MOYERS: You say that Atlanta, where you live now, which used to proclaim itself the finest city in the South, was built on the broken backs of re-enslaved black men.
DOUGLAS BLACKMON: That’s right. When I started off writing the book, I began to realize the degree to which this form of enslavement had metastasized across the South, and that Atlanta was one of many places where the economy that created the modern city, was one that relied very significantly on this form of coerced labor. And some of the most prominent families and individuals in the in the creation of the modern Atlanta, their fortunes originated from the use of this practice. And the most dramatic example of that was a brick factory on the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century, was producing hundreds of thousands of bricks every day.The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of those bricks. The factory was operated entirely with forced workers. And almost 100 percent black forced workers. There were even times that on Sunday afternoons, a kind of old-fashioned slave auction would happen, where a white man who controlled black workers would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse trade with the guards at Chattahoochee Brick, trading one man for another, or two men.

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Doug Blackmon, who heads the Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau, has made the New York Times Best Seller List with his historical expose Slavery by Another Name.

(A quick aside: Does anyone know the proper way to reference the list? Should “best seller” be two words? A compound? Hyphenated? Plural??? And is “list” capitalized? I just wasted 10 minutes Googling that, with no apparent resolution.)

Anyway … Blackmon’s book, published by Doubleday, placed no. 34 among best-selling non-fiction hardcovers. Go Doug!

Publisher’s Weekly called it “a groundbreaking and disturbing account of a sordid chapter in American history — the lease (essentially the sale) of convicts to ‘commercial interests’ between the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th.”

If you want Blackmon to sign a copy — or to help him celebrate his success — go to Manuel’s Tavern next Wednesday Tuesday (July 22) between 6 and 9 p.m.

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