A Legacy of Oppression: Reckoning with Race and History in the Age of Obama

Douglas A. Blackmon is the Atlanta Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal and a Pulitzer-prize winner for his groundbreaking book Slavery by Another Name:  The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.  

For the past 20 years, Mr. Blackmon has written extensively on 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. 

In 2000, the National Association of Black Journalists recognized Blackmon’s stories revealing the secret role of J.P. Morgan & Co. during the 1960s in funneling funds between a wealthy northern white supremacist and segregationists fighting the Civil Rights Movement in the South. 

A year later, he revealed in the Journal how U.S. Steel Corp. relied on forced black laborers in Alabama coal mines in the early 20th century, an article which led to his first book, Slavery By Another Name, which broadly examines how a form of neoslavery thrived in the U.S. long after legal abolition.