SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME
2012 SUNDANCE SELECTION

National Productions is developing Slavery by Another Name, a multi-part PBS project based upon the 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Wall Street Journal writer Douglas 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 into original documents and personal narratives, Slavery by Another Name unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after Emancipation and then back into involuntary servitude. It also tells stories of courage and redemption, and the men and women who fought against the re-emergence of human labor trafficking.

Directed by Sam Pollard

Original music by Michael Bacon