Dr.
Sharon Malone speaks during the 'Slavery By Another Name' panel during the
PBS portion of the 2012 Winter TCA
Tour held at The Langham Huntington Hotel and Spa on Jan. 4, 2012 in Pasadena , Calif.
Dr. Malone says she sensed that something was always on low boil with Uncle Henry. "
Uncle Henry" experienced the grip of slavery as described in the PBS Documentary "Slavery by Another Name."
*Imagine this...
You do some research into your family tree and discover that your uncle, who was born nearly 30 years
after slavery, was one of thousands of black men pulled
back into a forced labor system
in which they were arrested - largely on trumped up charges - and compelled to work without pay as prisoners.
Imagine
that this "convict leasing" system saw the groups of prisoners sold to
private parties -
like plantation owners or corporations - and that it
was not only tolerated by both the North and South,
but largely ignored by the U.S. Justice Department.
Now,
imagine that nearly a century after your uncle served 366 days in this penal
labor system,
you find yourself married to the head of the U.S. Justice
Department, who, ironically, just so happens
to be the first African American in the position.
Dr. Sharon Malone, wife of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, tells the heartbreaking story of her uncle Henry
in the upcoming 90-minute PBS documentary "Slavery by Another
Name." The film is based on the eye-opening
book by Douglas A. Blackmon,
which exposes a part of American history that most folks either had no clue
existed, or didn't know existed to the extent that it did.
"I want
people to understand that this is not something that's divorced and separate,
and this doesn't
have anything to do with them," Dr. Malone told EURweb
exclusively at the Television Critics Association press tour last week.
"If
you were a black person who grew up in the South, some way or the other -
whether or not you were directly
involved in the system as my uncle was - you knew somebody who was, or your daily lives were circumscribed by those circumstances."
"But
more importantly," she continues, "why I really want people to see this film
is because this is American history.
This isn't just southern history, or
African American history. It explains a lot of who we are as a people.
It is a missing puzzle piece for what happened. You had the Civil War, you had reconstruction, gap, gap, gap, a
nd then you're at Martin Luther King. This fills in that gap."
"Slavery
by Another Name," narrated by Laurence Fishburne and produced
and directed by Sam Pollard, premieres Monday, Feb. 13, 2012 at 9 p.m. ET on PBS. Scroll down to watch the promo.
History has repeated itself with the rate of incarcerations of this century!!
The New Jim Crow is a stunning account of the rebirth of a caste-like system in the United States, one that has resulted in millions of African Americans locked behind bars and then relegated to a permanent second-class status—denied the very rights supposedly won in the Civil Rights Movement. Since its publication in 2010, the book has been dubbed the "secular bible of a new social movement” by numerous commentators, including Cornel West, and has led to consciousness-raising efforts in universities, churches, community centers, re-entry centers and prisons nationwide. The New Jim Crow tells a truth our nation has been reluctant to face.
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