"[28], The film was one of four projects (together with The Abolitionists, The Loving Story[29] and Freedom Riders) included in "Created Equal: America's Civil Rights Struggle"—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. It was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The film is strea… Slavery by Another Name challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Thirteenth Amendment.The project documents what […] This was a huge success for both northern abolitionists as well as free blacks who fought during the Civil War—their hard work and effort finally paid off. Slavery by Another Name Docu Production: A TPT production, in association with Two Dollars and a Dream, with support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, W.K. EMBED. But such efforts received little support nationally and none in the South, which had disenfranchised most blacks to exclude them from the political system. 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. Based on Douglas A. Blackmon's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the film illuminates how in the years following the Civil War, insidious new forms of forced labor emerged in the American South, persisting until the onset of World War II. ...as I began to research, even I, as someone who had been paying attention to some of these sorts of things for a long time and was open to alternative explanations, even I was fairly astonished when I put it together, basically by going county by county and finding the criminal arrest records and the jail records in county after county after county from this period of time and seeing that if there had been crime waves, there had to have been records of crimes and people being arrested for crimes. Slavery by Another Name premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012. There's no harm in a dry history lesson, but Pollard may have hoped to achieve more than that. [2] It explores the forced labor of prisoners, overwhelmingly African American men, through the convict lease system used by states, local governments, white farmers, and corporations after the American Civil War until World War II in the southern United States. MPR's Cathy Wurzer discussed the documentary, "Slavery By Another Name," with author Douglas Blackmon and executive producer Catherine Allan. "[16], W. Fitzhugh Brundage wrote in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education that, Blackmon deserves high praise for this deeply moving and troubling history. In this epic research and media project, Blackmon and his collaborators bring to light a period of time when slavery had officially ended, yet a new form of was being reinstated. See Full Cast + Crew for Slavery by Another Name Features Load More Features Movie Reviews Presented by Rotten Tomatoes. Film & Theme Equality under the Law: Slavery by Another Name In 1865, the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment constitutionally outlawed slavery, and African American looked forward to what they would make of their new-found freedom. [17], In the Sunday Gazette-Mail, Chris Vognar called the book "chilling, doggedly reported and researched". SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME is a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans' most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. For most Americans this is entirely new history. 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. Blacks were often unable to pay even small fees and were sentenced to labor as a result; convicts were leased to plantations, lumber camps, and mines to be used for forced labor. "[8] Cottenham, who was born in the 1880s to two former slaves, was arrested in 1908 for vagrancy, a common pretext to detain blacks who did not have a white patron. The film was executive produced by Catherine Allan of Twin Cities Public Television, co-executive produced by Blackmon, directed by Sam Pollard, written by Sheila Curran Bernard, and narrated by Laurence Fishburne. [18] A review in the Rocky Mountain News stated of the book, "Displaying meticulous research, and personalizing the larger story through individual experiences, Blackmon's book opens the eyes and wrenches the gut. Host Michel Martin speaks with the film… Slavery by Another Name Synopsis. He especially deserves praise for teasing out the largest implications of his research. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced labor with shocking force and brutality. 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