Douglas A. Blackmon, Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, won a Pulitzer Prize in the general nonfiction category Monday.
Blackmon was awarded the prize for his book “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.”
Reached at his office minutes after the prizes were announced, Blackmon said he had a good feeling over the weekend about his chances.
“There were people who wouldn’t return phone calls, that sort of thing,” he said. “I’m feeling pretty good.”
Blackmon worked on the 496-page book for seven years, and some of the material he’d written about as a child 35 years ago growing up in rural Mississippi.
“It’s a huge honor for me, but more importantly, I hope it really validates the idea that this is a part of American history that we have ignored and neglected, and it’s time for a really dramatic reinterpretation of what happened to African-Americans during that period of time.”
Blackmon celebrated in the newsroom with his wife, Michelle, and their two children in attendance. He said telling this story helped him understand the conditions in which he grew up in Leland, Miss.
“It explains why the world I was raised in was still so starkly divided between black and white 100 years after the Civil War and Emancipation,” Blackmon said. “This is why poverty persisted, why the gap in education persisted, why poor white families like mine were able to emerge from poverty and find opportunities … while millions of African-American families didn’t have the same opportunities.”
Blackmon was previously an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter before joining the Wall Street Journal. He has been nominated multiple times for the Pulitzer Prize.
The Pulitzers are the most prestigious award in journalism.
On the Net: http://www.pulitzer.org
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