Tag: Douglas Blackmon
In a new documentary, a Pulitzer-winning Atlanta journalist examines the integration of his own Mississippi public school
The Georgia State University professor is tackling a story very close to home as writer and producer of a new documentary, The Harvest. Debuting September 12 on PBS’s The American Experience, The Harvest explores the story of first integrated public school class in Leland, Mississippi, of which Blackmon was a part of. The film is produced by prolific Oscar-nominated filmmaker and producer Sam Pollard (Citizen Ashe, Black Art: In the Absence of Light), who also worked on the documentary adaptation of Blackmon's Pulitzer-winning book, Slavery by Another Name.
At the old Bellwood quarry, a submerged history of racist violence
Located on the site of present-day Westside Park—the city’s premier new greenspace, a rambling campus surrounding a shimmering reservoir—Bellwood was one of a number of chain gang camps in Atlanta and across the state that lasted into the second half of the 20th century.
For decades, prisoners were forced into unpaid labor at a brickyard along the Chattahoochee River. How will we remember them?
For decades, long after the Civil War, men, women, and children convicted in Georgia courts—sometimes wrongly—were forced into unpaid labor at a brickyard along the Chattahoochee River. How will we remember them?
Interview: Doug Blackmon
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.