Monday, July 21, 2008
A&E / Events Get pumped up for Doug Blackmon — with Bill Moyers
Posted by David Lee Simmons on Mon, Jul 21, 2008 at 7:36 PM
As Mara Shalhoup reported last week in Fresh Loaf, Wall Street Journal Atlanta bureau chief Doug Blackmon will appear Wednesday Tuesday at Manuel's Tavern (6-9 p.m.) to promote his critically acclaimed book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. This, on the heels of Blackmon's book creeping onto the New York Times Bestseller List.
To get psyched up for the appearance, here's a video of Blackmon's appearance on the always-excellent PBS show "Bill Moyers Journal," which also includes on the link a full transcript of the interview if you'd like to read instead of watch. Here's a key exchange, about Atlanta's role in all of this (thanks to John Otte on ArtNews) …
BILL MOYERS: You say that Atlanta, where you live now, which used to proclaim itself the finest city in the South, was built on the broken backs of re-enslaved black men.DOUGLAS BLACKMON: That’s right. When I started off writing the book, I began to realize the degree to which this form of enslavement had metastasized across the South, and that Atlanta was one of many places where the economy that created the modern city, was one that relied very significantly on this form of coerced labor. And some of the most prominent families and individuals in the in the creation of the modern Atlanta, their fortunes originated from the use of this practice. And the most dramatic example of that was a brick factory on the outskirts of town that, at the turn of the century, was producing hundreds of thousands of bricks every day.The city of Atlanta bought millions and millions of those bricks. The factory was operated entirely with forced workers. And almost 100 percent black forced workers. There were even times that on Sunday afternoons, a kind of old-fashioned slave auction would happen, where a white man who controlled black workers would go out to Chattahoochee Brick and horse trade with the guards at Chattahoochee Brick, trading one man for another, or two men.
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