Slavery by Another Name

PBS Film

Slavery by Another Name: The Documentary Film premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and had its national broadcast on PBS on Feb. 13, 2012. Check with your local PBS station for rebroadcasts. You can also watch the film online at the link below, or go behind the scenes with “The Making of Slavery by Another Name.”

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