Reporter to Discuss Pulitzer-Prize-Winning Book at UA

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Douglas Blackmon, former bureau chief at the Wall Street Journal, will visit The University of Alabama Feb. 23 to speak about his Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.”

The lecture will be at 6 p.m. in room 205 of Gorgas Library on the UA campus.

“Slavery by Another Name” won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Award and an American Book Award.

The book explores the development and institutionalization of the convict-lease system in the South, and it was made into a PBS documentary that debuted in February 2012.

The Mississippi native has written extensively about race in the South including the integration of schools and lesser known stories of the Civil Rights Movement. During his visit to UA, Blackmon will show portions of the documentary as well as meet with history and communications classes.

The lecture is sponsored by UA’s College of Arts and Sciences, the Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South, New College, the Blount Undergraduate Initiative, and the departments of American studies, journalism, gender and race studies, history and criminal justice. It is free and open to the public.

Blackmon spent 16 years with The Wall Street Journal as a correspondent and later bureau chief. Most recently, he has been a contributing editor to the Washington Post and chair of the Miller Center Forum, which is a nationally syndicated weekly television program produced by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

Blackmon has written about significant national events including the 2010 midterm elections, the rise of the Tea Party movement, the 2012 president campaigns, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the subprime mortgage meltdown in 2008 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

He received the 2011 New York Association of Publishers prize for Investigative Reporting for his coverage of the BP disaster, a National Headliner award in 2006 for coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and his article on U.S. Steel was included in the 2003 edition of Best Business Stories.

Prior to joining the Journal in 1995, Blackmon was a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he covered race and politics, and he received special reporting assignments including covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Previously, he was a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat and managing editor of the Daily Record in Little Rock, Ark.

UA’s College of Arts and Sciences is the University’s largest division and the largest liberal arts college in the state. Students from the College have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships, Goldwater Scholarships and memberships on the USA Today Academic All American Team.