Slavery by Another Name began as an article which Blackmon wrote for The Wall Street Journal detailing the use of black forced labor by U.S. Steel Corporation.
He grew up in Washington County, Mississippi, where as a seventh grader he was encouraged by his teacher and his mother to research a local racist incident, despite the opposition of some citizens.
[4] Blackmon began to research the subject more widely, visiting various southern county courthouses to obtain records of arrest, conviction, and sentences.
[6] In the introduction to Slavery by Another Name, Blackmon describes his experience as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal "asking a provocative question: What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?
"[7] His story describing corporate use of black forced labor in the post-Civil War South generated more response than any other piece he had written, and inspired him to pursue a book-length study of the subject (see Reconstruction Era).
As context, Blackmon describes the beginnings of "industrial slavery",[9] in which convict laborers were put to work in factories or mines rather than cotton fields.
[11] Joseph E. Brown, former governor of Georgia, amassed great wealth based on his use of convict labor in his Dade Coal Company mines and other enterprises, from 1874 to 1894.
[11] In the book's epilogue, Blackmon argues for the importance of acknowledging this history of forced labor: [T]he evidence moldering in county courthouses and the National Archives compels us to confront this extinguished past, to recognize the terrible contours of the record, to teach our children the truth of a terror that pervaded much of American life, to celebrate its end, to lift any shame on those who could not evade it.
"[17] W. Fitzhugh Brundage wrote in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education that Blackmon deserves high praise for this deeply moving and troubling history.
"[20] African American Studies scholar James Smethurst was more critical, writing in The Boston Globe that "this catalogue of the nadir is one of the book's weaknesses, since it sometimes departs from its account of peonage without much transition.
Paying more attention to the considerable presence of involuntary servitude in African-American literature and intellectual history, reaching back to Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar, would have helped".
The award committee called it "a precise and eloquent work that examines a deliberate system of racial suppression and rescues a multitude of atrocities from virtual obscurity.
[28]Kunbi Tinuoye, writing for the Griot, described the film as a "powerful documentary" that "challenges the widely held belief that the enslavement of African-Americans ended with President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.
"[29] The film was one of four projects (together with The Abolitionists, The Loving Story[30] and Freedom Riders) included in "Created Equal: America's Civil Rights Struggle Archived October 17, 2018, at the Wayback Machine"—a nationwide community engagement initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, designed to reach 500 communities between September 2013 and extended from December 2016 to December 2018.