CRUSADER BY ANOTHER NAME
Douglas Blackmon’s work puts heart-breaking wrongs in their place — right in front of our eyes.
The voiceless, forgotten dead are telling stories.
They’re speaking out in professor of practice Douglas Blackmon’s “Documenting History” class, where a dozen students research and discuss the sobering fates of thousands of unlucky Americans, nearly all of them Black, who endured hard and often-deadly labor in the South’s brutal “Age of Neoslavery.”
Blackmon coined that term in “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.” His landmark book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2009, and its revelations lie at the heart of today’s classroom work at Georgia State’s Creative Media Industries Institute (CMII).
Blackmon tasks students with breaking the shackles of silence that obscure victims of a period of American history (1865-1945) even uglier, in its own dark ways, than actual slavery.
Prior to the Civil War, the economic system of the South depended on slave labor. Desperate to sustain that economy after the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves and after military defeat in 1865, the power structure in the South maneuvered through Reconstruction and afterward to create laws and institute cultural suppression that ensured cheap, abundant labor — in prison stripes.
“It was a form of bondage,” Blackmon explains, “a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.”
A man arrested one afternoon for a petty crime — vagrancy, for example, a most innocuous and subjective offense — could find himself the next morning loading coal at the bottom of a mine or driving railroad spikes under a searing sun. Prisoners could be mistreated with impunity. The enslaved convicts lived in conditions in which disease, whippings and neglect of injuries routinely disabled or killed them.
Blackmon’s research for “Slavery by Another Name” revealed many thousands of such bitter cases. Now, in his spring class, he’s tasking students with researching this re-enslavement period, focusing on Atlanta in the early 20th century. These students dig deep into the scant records of long-dead victims of this cruel system of mass incarceration, bringing their long-forgotten stories to light.
Tyler Jones is a junior majoring in media entrepreneurship. He considers Documenting History a revelation.
“When slavery was taught in elementary and middle school, convict leasing along with a multitude of other systems of oppression were never mentioned,” Jones says. “The notion was that slavery happened for a while, ended, then Black people were just ‘free.’ This class has exposed a lot of this nation’s secrets and omissions of history.”
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BLACKMON'S JOURNEY
Blackmon has fashioned a glittering career in his 56 years. He came to Georgia State in 2018 as a writer of international renown, a scholar and a filmmaker.
Seven years before the Pulitzer for “Slavery by Another Name,” he and colleagues at The Wall Street Journal had won a Pulitzer for coverage of the 9/11 terror attacks. Reporters under his direction at the Journal were finalists for another Pulitzer in 2011 for reporting on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
After the success of “Slavery by Another Name,” he signed on from 2012 to 2018 at the University of Virginia as a faculty member and senior Fellow in presidential studies at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. He hosted a 30-minute television interview program, “American Forum,” aired on more than 250 public television stations across the United States.
But home called. In Atlanta’s Grant Park neighborhood, Blackmon’s wife and children, including a son at Georgia State, had patiently endured six years of commuter marriage and parenthood as Blackmon worked in Charlottesville, Va. When Georgia State offered an opportunity to establish the Narrating Justice Project within the CMII and the College of Arts & Sciences, he said yes.
Blackmon says the opportunity to work in blended media was especially attractive. Writing continues — he’s co-authoring a new book with former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. — but Blackmon’s mission has moved beyond just words. In 2012, for example, his co-produced PBS documentary based on “Slavery by Another Name” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. (More than 5 million viewers saw the film’s first broadcasts on PBS, and it has been rebroadcast thousands of times nationally and by local affiliates.)
Blackmon is in production on “The Harvest,” a new film examining the transformation of U.S. society since the 1960s as captured in the 50-year journey of a group of children born in one small Mississippi town in 1964. (Blackmon grew up in Leland, Miss., where he earned his first byline at age 12 by phoning in a report on a national Boy Scouts Jamboree in Pennsylvania to the hometown newspaper.)
He senses unexplored potential in creative media.
“From the very beginning,” Blackmon explains, “I was interested in other ways of doing things. At The Wall Street Journal, I was involved in the rollout of our online edition, the first at one of the big papers to be commercially viable. Even as I was writing the book, I could see the possibility of film, and from the get-go I built an elaborate platform for it, ahead of its time. The idea of marrying together a range of different media forms fits my interests.”
Among his ongoing projects, Blackmon teams with CMII, GSUTV and the Rialto Center for the Arts to host and moderate “Crucial Conversations,” a series of televised civil, nonpartisan discussions around racial equity and reconciliation.
One episode recently made a difference in the way Atlanta may define future progress in light of its largely unacknowledged past.
Much of Atlanta was built — literally — from clay bricks manufactured at Chattahoochee Brick Company, nine miles from downtown on the banks of the Chattahoochee River.
Much of Atlanta was built — literally — from clay bricks manufactured at Chattahoochee Brick Company, nine miles from downtown on the banks of the Chattahoochee River.
Bricks strewn about at the site of the old Chattahoochee Brick Company along the banks of the Chattahoochee River in northwest Atlanta. Photo courtesy of Chattahoochee Riverlands.
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A CITY ON BROKEN BODIES
Much of Atlanta was built — literally — from clay bricks manufactured at Chattahoochee Brick Company, nine miles from downtown on the banks of the Chattahoochee River. As Blackmon writes in “Slavery by Another Name,” after its founding in 1878, Chattahoochee Brick relied for decades on enslaved prison workers, hundreds at a time, to dig clay, mold bricks, fire furnaces and haul hot, heavy loads onto transport vehicles.
Conditions were worse than anything Charles Dickens ever fictionalized in novels of the Industrial Age that gave us the term “Dickensian” to describe harsh working environments.
Blackmon unflinchingly described, in “Slavery by Another Name,” what Georgia lawmakers heard in a 1908 investigation into working conditions at Chattahoochee Brick:
A string of witnesses told the legislative committee that prisoners at the plant were forced to work under unbearable circumstances, fed rotting and rancid food, housed in barracks rife with insects, driven with whips into the hottest and most intolerable areas of the plant, and continually required to work at a constant run in the heat of the ovens. The plant was so hot that guards didn’t carry guns for fear their cartridges might spontaneously detonate.
One former guard told the committee that two hundred to three hundred floggings were administered each month. “They were whipping all the time. It would be hard to tell how many whippings they did a day,” testified Arthur W. Moore, a white ex-employee of the company. Another former guard said Captain Casey was a “barbarous” whipping boss who beat fifteen to twenty convicts each day, often until they begged and screamed.
“You can hear that any time you go out there. When you get within a quarter of a mile you will hear them,” testified Ed Strickland.
The chief beneficiary of Chattahoochee Brick? James English, a Confederate veteran who rose to become Atlanta mayor and arguably the most powerful man in the city.
A Chattahoochee Brick Company letterhead from the early 1900s. Courtesy of the Atlanta History Center.
English’s rise came at the expense of legions of enslaved workers at Chattahoochee Brick and his other projects (mining, railroads, timber, etc.). English’s operations near the start of the 20th century controlled 1,206 of Georgia’s 2,881 convict laborers. English’s great wealth, and the similarly ill-gained fortunes of other Atlanta founding fathers like Joel Hurt, can be traced forward into the early financing of the city’s most venerable institutions — soft drink companies, banks, railroads and other bulwarks of the local economy that made fortunes for many Atlantans.
The city’s past caught up with it when locally headquartered railroad company Norfolk Southern recently announced plans to construct a big new fuel terminal. It had in mind a 75-acre property leased on the banks of the Chattahoochee — the original location of the brickyards.
When the company floated its plan, Blackmon’s book stood at the center of a controversy. His research proved that innocent men had died at Chattahoochee Brick — from overwork, beatings or neglected health — and had been buried in now-lost graves on the property. Would Atlanta allow a historic and hallowed site to be rolled over in the name of progress?
Volume rose around the issue. Smartly timed, Blackmon moderated a “Crucial Conversations” episode. He invited a historian from Morehouse College, a spokesperson for the railroad and a community activist from an economically challenged nearby neighborhood called English Park — named for James English himself. (A monument to the former mayor rests there in a small, green park.)
On the program, community activist Donna Stephens (B.A. ‘97) quietly but passionately articulated the opposition many in her neighborhood and Atlanta felt toward the proposed Norfolk Southern development: It addressed a privileged few without consideration or benefit for those most affected.
“The door is constantly closing on a part of the population that is Black,” Stephens says. “What happened at Chattahoochee Brick kind of reflects those issues. While we don’t have a blatant disregard of human rights, we do have a blatant disregard for history.”
Not long after, activists including members of the Atlanta City Council held a protest against the development. Then, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms weighed in.
“Our Administration will do everything it can to protect the sanctity and significance of this property,” Bottoms said in a news release. “A site of such historic and environmental importance needs careful consideration before even limited development occurs.”
Norfolk Southern suspended development plans that included preliminary proposals for some sort of memorial to Chattahoochee Brick victims and a walking trail.
“You can never pinpoint exactly why something like this happens,” Blackmon says, “but there’s no doubt that the activity around our program, even before it aired, helped trigger the domino effects leading to the cancellation of the whole project.”
A wanted poster for escaped convict laborers at the Chattahoochee Brick Company. A marker for the grave of one escapee, Avery Bates, is on the grounds. Blackmon's research proved that men died there from overwork, beatings or neglected health and were buried in now-lost graves on the property.
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CLASS ACTS
Blackmon’s class — now partly virtual and partly in-person — confronts students with subjects like the Norfolk Southern project, the Black Lives Matter movement, Confederate monuments and others hot in the headlines. He connects today’s issues to yesterday’s actions, often uncomfortably.
During one class, Blackmon reminded students of their big assignment — to choose a name from a curated list of convict laborers, then research and tell that man’s story, if anything remains to be told.
“How do we get at the stories of the obscure person who didn’t leave behind a big body of the record of his life, who probably couldn’t read or write well, who didn’t write letters to parents?” Blackmon asked in class. “How do we identify somebody from this obscure time in the past and see this was a real, live human being?
“How,” Blackmon challenged, “do we reanimate them enough to value them, to extend some sliver of dignity, to hold accountable people responsible for the bad things that happened to them? The same people who put up monuments were the people committing these grave atrocities to people powerless to stop them. We can’t understand the monuments and mythology unless we realize the full humanity of the people crushed by them.”
Blackmon later illustrated how quickly even well-known people are lost to history.
“Name a lieutenant of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” he asked.
The class paused. Blackmon waited expectantly for an answer from his bright, engaged students.
“John Lewis,” someone offered.
“John Lewis,” Blackmon nodded. “Who else?”
A second pause stretched longer. Then, even longer.
Eventually, Blackmon gave prompts to draw out other names, and finally he was forced to fill in the blanks himself. No one in the class spontaneously offered Andrew Young, Hosea Williams, Ralph David Abernathy or Jesse Jackson.
See? Those once-famous names are already fading from memory, Blackmon seemed to suggest. If today’s students can’t immediately name civil rights leaders who were household names only yesterday, then how can history possibly hold onto — and make meaningful — the story from a hundred years ago of a loitering 14-year-old boy rounded up on an Atlanta street then beaten and worked to death in a brickyard?
“Within a decade, there won’t be anybody left alive who actually worked with Dr. King,” Blackmon says. “Increasingly, as years go by, all those people will vanish … except for street names and those kinds of commemorations of their lives.”
That’s his point.
“There’s a reason why things like a Confederate monument are made of stone. They could conceivably last hundreds of years, and they never stop speaking. And they tell a story that’s incomplete.”
The rest of the story, or at least the parts that can still be told, depend now on Blackmon, his students and Documenting History.
Read an additional interview with Blackmon from the magazine here.
Top Photo by Meg Buscema
