Prisoners at work in a rock quarry, most likely in the early 1940s. Photographer unknown. (Library of Congress; from www.slaverybyanothername.com)

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Americans think they know the sorry history of the post-Civil War South. Jim Crow laws hemming in African-Americans. Lynchings. Klansmen riding high.

In fact, the history is much sorrier even than that.

In an explosive work of investigative history that just won the Pulitzer Prize, a white son of Mississippi, Douglas Blackmon, has uncovered incredible virtual slavery that went on for decades after the Civil War. Black men chained, whipped, and bound in forced labor until almost World War II.

This hour, On Point: History denied and revealed — American slavery by another name.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Douglas Blackmon joins us from Atlanta, Georgia. He won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction for his book “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.” He’s Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, and his articles on race, wealth and other issues have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize four times. Born in Arkansas in 1964, and raised in Mississippi, he was in the first racially integrated class of children in Mississippi to begin the first grade together, in 1970.

More links:

Blackmon’s book has an impressive companion website. It includes a series of stunning and disturbing photo galleries, with images like the one below (see the full gallery here):

An unnamed prisoner tied around a pickax for punishment in a Georgia labor camp. Photograph by John L. Spivak, during research for his 1932 book, "Georgia Nigger." (From "Slavery by Another Name," by Douglas Blackmon)

The Book of Night Women

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Slavery in the United States was bad, and bad enough. Slavery in Jamaica was something else again.

A tiny portion of whites. An overwhelming black majority in bondage. Escaped blacks preying on runaway blacks. An island engulfed in brutality.

In a powerful new novel, young Jamaican writer Marlon James takes us back to 1800, and into a circle of slave women plotting revolt. Into a secret sisterhood, and the life of one young slave seeking to be human in an inhuman world.

This hour, On Point: Jamaican novelist Marlon James and “The Book of Night Women.”

You can join the conversation. What do you know about life in Jamaica in the heart of its slavery years? About the role of women?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Marlon James joins us in our studio. Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1970, he won critical praise for his first novel, “John Crow’s Devil.” He is now a professor of literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.  His new novel is “The Book of Night Women.” The New York Times calls it “beautifully written and devastating.” The Chicago Tribune calls it “a bright dream of hell … painted with a brush dipped in blood.”

Read an excerpt from “The Book of Night Women.”

Kaamilah Furqah, 13, views the Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 2007 at the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark. (AP)

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On January 1st, 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation — the historic document that freed America’s slaves, sort of.

In the midst of civil war and politics and military challenge, Lincoln’s act was narrowly aimed at slaves under Confederate control. Their bondage remained unbroken — and once broken, gave way to many decades of Jim Crow oppression.

But the Emancipation Proclamation stands as a national watershed. Now, with Barack Obama headed for the White House, its history speaks again. On January 20, Obama will lay his hand on Lincoln’s Bible to take his oath as President of the United States. It’s a good moment to look back on history.

This hour, On Point: The Emancipation Proclamation and its resonance today.

You can join the conversation. Barack Obama reveres “the Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln. Do you? And how do Lincoln’s acts echo this year in Washington? Tell us what you think.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Washington is Edna Greene Medford, associate professor of history at Howard University. She specializes in 19th-century African-American history and is co-author of “The Emancipation Proclamation: Three Views,” with Harold Holzer and Frank Williams.

And from Hanover, N.H., is Jack Beatty, On Point news analyst and senior editor at The Atlantic. He’s written about 19th-century American history himself, most recently in his book “Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900.”

More links:

The National Archives website features a digital reproduction of the original Emancipation Proclamation, as well as the text version; the “preliminary” proclamation of September 22, 1862; and a background essay by historian John Hope Franklin.

In the November 1862 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Ralph Waldo Emerson reacted to Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in an essay, and the national mythology was born before the proclamation had even been signed:

It is not a measure that admits of being taken back. Done, it cannot be undone by a new Administration…. This act makes that the lives of our heroes have not been sacrificed in vain….

With this blot removed from our national honor, this heavy load lifted off the national heart, we shall not fear henceforward to show our faces among mankind. We shall cease to be hypocrites and pretenders, but what we have styled our free institutions will be such.

In December 1866, also in The Atlantic, Frederick Douglass appealed to the United States Congress to live up to the promise of Lincoln’s proclamation:

Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure, barren of permanent results, — a scandalous and shocking waste of blood and treasure … or whether, on the other hand, we shall, as the rightful reward of victory over treason have a solid nation, entirely delivered from all contradictions and social antagonisms, based upon loyalty, liberty, and equality, must be determined one way or the other by the present session of Congress.

As we know, it would be a century, and more, before liberty and equality began to be realized for African Americans.

David Pettee always loved family history. But there was a lot he did not know. His old New England family talked plenty of Pilgrims and Puritans. They did not talk about slaves in the family. Or slave traders.

But when Pettee really opened the books, there they were — and more. A torched village. Rum for Africans. The ship’s manifest with “salt, cotton, tobacco — and Negroes.”

He went to Africa. He called the descendants of the slaves his family owned. On the phone. We’ll hear from him. And them.

This hour, On Point: Slaves in the family, way north of the Mason-Dixon line

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Rev. David Pettee, Director of Ministerial Credentialing at the Unitarian Universalist Association, and descendant of Rhode Island slave owner Ewdard Simmons.

Patricia Mann, CEO of Royal Reporting and descendant of the slave Cuff Simmons.