Tag: convict leasing

As a member of the first integrated elementary school class in his hometown of Leland, Mississippi, forty-two years ago, Douglas Blackmon had a precocious understanding of the color line that divided the South. The experience piqued a lifelong interest in the complexities of race that Blackmon has revisited often as senior national correspondent at the Wall Street Journal and as the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the 2008 book "Slavery by Another Name." The book details the horrifying, hidden history of the convict leasing of African Americans through peonage and unjust imprisonment well after the end of the Civil War.