WSJ’s Doug Blackmon wins Pulitzer Prize

Doug Blackmon, the Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau chief, can now add a Pulitzer Prize to his long list of accomplishments.

Blackmon today was named the general non-fiction award winner for his book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

The critically acclaimed book revealed the difficult lives of thousands of former slaves who were thrust into a brutally unfair world of forced labor and physical torture — decades after American slavery supposedly ended.

Thousands of other African Americans were simply seized by southern landowners and compelled into years of involuntary servitude. Government officials leased falsely imprisoned blacks to small-town entrepreneurs, provincial farmers, and dozens of corporations—including U.S. Steel—looking for cheap and abundant labor. Armies of “free” black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

Pulitzer judges called Blackmon’s book “a precise and eloquent work that examines a deliberate system of racial suppression and that rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity.”

Congrats, Doug. Well deserved.