Blackmon, Slavery By Another Name

Originally written by American writer and journalist Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name was a book published in 2008 that talks about the travesties of the mistreatment of newly free African Americans in the south, now made into a 2012 PBS documentary. Throughout the documentary many different historians are brought on to impart knowledge on the various events that happened in the post Emancipation South, the movie often takes a dark and dreary tone when talking about the events that happened in America’s troubled past, and rightly so. The subject matter of this movie wants to convince the watcher that what the whites did during those years were unforgivable.
Blackmon’s history in journalism definitely contributed to how this documentary is presented to the viewer. He tells the viewer about the main historical figures that we’ll be focusing on, their birthday, what they were doing around the end of the civil war, and what they did before they were arrested for what are seemingly meaningless reasons. After that the documentary gives the viewer some background on the civil war, and what African Americans did directly after the war. The documentary feels like it was directed like a well-made news article, and should be commended for
For example, Christina Comer, a decadent of J.W. Comer learned that her grandfather was a former slave owner, then a prison owner who bought African criminals, using them as cheap labor. In addition to all the other brutal ways he treated his workers. Christina was brought to tears, stating that she “didn’t leave the house for two days.” Another example was of the child of a man who lived around 1890, she was told of how her father was mistreated for believing that African Americans were just as good as anyone else. Her stories act as a good secondhand resource, and gives good emotional weight to the documentary’s