Douglas A. Blackmon photo

Douglas A. Blackmon

Douglas A. Blackmon is an American writer and a Pulitzer Prize winner. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Slavery by Another Name unearths the lost stories of tens of thousands of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude in the 20th century. Announcing the prize, the Pulitzer committee 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."

Blackmon was born in Arkansas and grew up in the Mississippi Delta. He previously worked as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Currently, he works as Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal.

A documentary film based on Slavery by Another Name is currently in production.


“When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our “fault.” But it is undeniably our inheritance.”
Douglas A. Blackmon
Read more