Slavery by Another Name

Film. By Sam Pollard, Catherine Allan, Douglas Blackmon and Sheila Curran Bernard. 2012. 90 minutes.
Reveals the interlocking forces in the South and the North that enabled “neoslavery” post-Emancipation Proclamation.

Time Periods: 19th Century, 1865, 1877, 20th Century, 1900, 1910, 1920

Themes: Criminal Justice & Incarceration, African American, Reconstruction, Racism & Racial Identity, Slavery and Resistance

Slavery by Another Name challenges one of our country’s most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The documentary recounts how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, keeping hundreds of thousands of African Americans in bondage, trapping them in a brutal system that would persist until the onset of World War II.

Based on Blackmon’s research and book of the same title, Slavery by Another Name spans eight decades, from 1865 to 1945, revealing the interlocking forces in both the South and the North that enabled this “neoslavery” to begin and persist. Using archival photographs and dramatic re-enactments filmed on location in Alabama and Georgia, it tells the forgotten stories of both victims and perpetrators of neoslavery and includes interviews with their descendants living today. The program also features interviews with Douglas Blackmon and with leading scholars of this period. [Description from PBS.]

Directed by Sam Pollard, produced by Catherine Allan and Douglas Blackmon, written by Sheila Curran Bernard, based on the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Blackmon.