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PDFAlabama prison officials banned the award-winning book. Will they now stop prisoners from viewing the upcoming PBS documentary based on it, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II?
The PBS broadcast on Monday, February 13, comes in the wake of the admission by Alabama prison officials that they banned prisoners from reading the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Blackmon based on its content examining racial history in the South. Officials at Kilby Correctional Facility in Mt. Meigs, Alabama, made this admission in response to a civil rights lawsuit that was brought against them in September 2011 by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI).
The book by Mr. Blackmon, an award-winning journalist and political correspondent for the Washington Post, documents how African Americans in Alabama and throughout the South were re-enslaved in the years following the Civil War, due in part to laws specifically written to facilitate the arbitrary arrest of African Americans.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, describes how Slavery by Another Name was mailed on September 21, 2010, to Kilby inmate and plaintiff Mark Melvin. Kilby Captain Victor Napier told Mr. Melvin, “You know you can’t have [this book] here,” explaining that it was “too provocative” and posed a “security threat.”
In their answer to the complaint filed by EJI, prison officials stated that their decision to deny access to the book was made “on the basis that the book, its title, its contents and/or its pictures could be used (or misused) by…inmates to incite violence or disobedience within the institution.”
EJI’s lawsuit states: “Slavery by Another Name is an educational and historical work that illuminates a chapter of American racial oppression and prejudice in the southern United States following the Civil War; it does not advocate racial violence or a violent political ideology…”
“Slavery by Another Name is widely recognized as a reputable account of a deeply disturbing part of our country’s history that must be grappled with and understood,” states EJI Director Bryan Stevenson, who filed the suit. “With PBS preparing to broadcast the documentary version of the book, there is an opportunity for renewed scrutiny of any attempts to censor informed thinking by Alabama prisoners about race and discrimination, a population disproportionately comprised of people of color.”
In addition to winning the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, the book has been the recipient of numerous awards and was named by The Georgia Center for the Book, the largest non-profit literary organization in the Southeast and an affiliate of the Library of Congress, as one of the “25 Books All Georgians Should Read.”
(Thanks to Equal Justice Intiative for this story)
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