Next Wednesday, Douglas Blackmon, Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, will speak at the First Amendment Festival about his work on the “neo-slavery” of African Americans from 1865 to the 20th century. Blackmon will also be the final keynote speaker for the year-long dialogue on mass incarceration.

The 52-year-old Mississippi native said he has been a journalist since the age of 12 and started working regularly for newspapers at the age of 15. He graduated from Hendrix College in Arkansas.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he worked on several news stories for The Wall Street Journal on institutional racism and the practice of forced labor of African Americans by businesses in the South.

“If you asked yourself, ‘Why was it so many terrible practices around race continued for so long after they were no longer required by law?’’ he said. “The part of that discussion that had never been had was the role of business in all of it.”

These stories later on became the inspiration for his book, “Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.” The book was also transformed into a PBS documentary where Blackmon had a role as the co-executive producer.

Blackmon is also the the host and executive producer for “American Forum,” which has been on the air for the past four years and he is a contributing writer for The Washington Post.

“It’s sort of a Charlie Rose style interview show between me and a scholar or a presidential candidate or a leading intellectual of some sort,” he said.

His plans include a new book and film that focus on the failure of public school integration in America. Both of those will come out in 2017.