Submitted by Timberland Regional Library
Douglas A. Blackmon, author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning book “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,” will speak at the Olympia Timberland Library on Friday, February 22 from 7 to 8:15 p.m. The program will occur after regular library hours. Books will be available for purchase and signing. The lecture is free of charge and open to the public.
Slavery by Another Name presents evidence that slavery in the United States did not end with the Civil War, instead persisting well into the 20th century. It exposes the forced labor of African American men and women, often imprisoned speciously, through the convict lease system used by southern states, local governments, white farmers, and corporations after the American Civil War until World War II in the southern United States. Based on original documents and personal narratives, Slavery by Another Name unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who were pressed back into involuntary servitude after the Emancipation Proclamation had promised freedom. Blackmon continues to gather personal narratives on the subject.
A New York Times bestseller in both hardback and paperback, the book won the 2009 prize for General Non-Fiction. The Pulitzer committee called it “a precise and eloquent work that examines a deliberate system of racial suppression and that rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity.”
About the author:
Blackmon is a contributing editor at The Washington Post and chair and host of Forum, a public affairs program that airs on PBS stations. Until joining the Washington Post in 2011, Blackmon was the longtime chief of The Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau and the paper’s Senior National Correspondent. He has written about or directed coverage of some of the most pivotal stories in American life.
Blackmon is a much sought after lecturer on race, history and social memory. In 2010, he was invited by Attorney General Eric Holder to present a lecture to senior Department of Justice officials in Washington D.C. He has also lectured at Harvard School of Law, Yale University, Princeton and many other institutions.
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 in the 1970s and the dilemma of how a contemporary society should grapple with a troubled past. He also co-produced a 90-minute documentary film based on his book that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and on PBS in early 2012.
Blackmon grew up in Leland, Mississippi and now lives in Atlanta, Georgia and Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Olympia Timberland Library is located at 313 8th Avenue. For more information, contact the library at (360) 352-0595 or visit www.TRL.org.
