Blackmon was born in Stuttgart, Arkansas, and grew up in Leland, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta. He has said that the small town of 6,000 was evenly split between blacks and whites; the county and area, one of plantations, was majority black.[2] It was the site of a plantation strike among black laborers, leading to extensive civil rights activity in the mid-twentieth century.[2] He graduated from Hendrix College.[3]
In 2008, Blackmon published Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, which explored the history of peonage and convict lease labor in the South after the American Civil War. He revealed the stories of tens of thousands of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and then journeyed back into the shadow of involuntary servitude, which lasted into the 20th century.[5] In 2009, Blackmon was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for Slavery by Another Name.[1][6]
A documentary film which is based on Blackmon's book and also titled Slavery by Another Name, was aired on February 13, 2012, on PBS stations.[5] The film can be viewed in its entirety on the PBS website.[7]
From 2012 until 2018 Blackmon was the host and executive producer of American Forum, a weekly public-affairs program that was broadcast on more than 250 PBS stations in the United States. It was produced in conjunction with the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, where Blackmon was a senior fellow and the Director of Public Programs.[8][9]
Since 2018, Blackmon has taught at Georgia State University in Atlanta, and leads a major research project in conjunction with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights to identify thousands of forced laborers compelled into involuntary servitude by the criminal justice system under horrific conditions at early 20th Century work camps, such as the notorious Chattahoochee Brick Company in Atlanta.[10]
In 2023, Blackmon accepted an appointment to a mayoral task force examining issues surrounding a proposed police and emergency personnel training center, dubbed “Cop City” by critics. The 38 members of the group included both supporters and opponents of the training center, as well as members who said they had not yet taken a position on the controversy.[11]
Blackmon served on a committee focused on memorialization of past victims of mass incarceration at the site, and recommended preservation of ruins of an earlier city jail as an educational installation portraying the history of racial abuse by Atlanta police, memorializing citizens who were unjustly victimized, and honoring the history of protest in Atlanta against police abuse—including demonstrations by Black Lives Matter and opponents of the “Cop City” training facility. In the final presentation of the task force findings, Blackmon called the report a call for a “the most sweeping reexamination ever of policing in Atlanta.” [12]
In the fall of 2023, Blackmon and his creative partner, filmmaker Sam Pollard, completed The Harvest, a deeply personal two-hour documentary examining the consequences of the failed integration of public school’s in Blackmon’s Mississippi hometown. Written and narrated by Blackmon, and co-produced with Pollard, the film was first broadcast on PBS on September 12, 2023.[13]The Harvest was announced in July 2023 as one of six finalist for the Library of Congress/Ken Burns Prize, one of the highest honors for documentary film.[14]
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