Convocation: Doug Blackmon

Doug Blackmon is the Wall Street Journal’s bureau chief in Atlanta. Over the past 20 years, he has written extensively about the American quandary of race, exploring the integration of schools during his childhood in a Mississippi Delta farm town, lost episodes of the Civil Rights movement, and, repeatedly, the dilemma of how a contemporary society should grapple with a troubled past. Many of his stories in The Wall Street Journal have explored the interplay of wealth, corporate conduct and racial segregation. In 2001, he revealed how U.S. Steel Corp. relied on forced black laborers in Alabama coal mines in the early 20th century. The article led to his first book, Slavery By Another Name, which broadly examines how a form of neoslavery thrived in the U.S. long after legal abolition. The title of his presentation was "A Persistent Past: Reckoning with Our Troubled Racial History in the Age of Obama."