Douglas A. Blackmon

Douglas A. Blackmon is the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, chair of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center Forum, and a contributor to The Washington Post.

His book, a searing examination of how the enslavement of African-Americans persisted deep into the 20th century, was a New York Times bestseller and won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The documentary film based on Slavery By Another Name, and co-executive produced by Blackmon, premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast nationally on PBS. Previously, Blackmon was the longtime Atlanta bureau and Senior National Correspondent at The Wall Street Journal. He wrote about or directed coverage for the Journal of major events such the rise of the tea party movement, presidential politics, and Hurricane Katrina and the failed federal response after that disaster. He and a team of other WSJ reporters were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2011, for coverage of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Blackmon has written extensively over the past 25 years 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 explored the interplay of wealth, corporate conduct, the American judicial system, and racial segregation. International assignments have included the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the reunification of East and West Germany and the Civil War in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia.