The South
Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Blending personal memoir with historical accounts, this searing history of the Jim Crow South captures the realities of those who experienced it—and shines a light on its enduring legacy.
The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but not a nuanced understanding of everyday life in Jim Crow America. In The South, Adolph L. Reed Jr.—hailed by Cornel West as “the greatest democratic theorist of his generation”—takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South.
Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. Through his personal history and political acumen, we see America’s apartheid system from the ground up, not just its legal framework or systems of power, but the way these systems structured the day-to-day interactions, lives, and ambitions of ordinary working people.
The South is more than a memoir or a history. Filled with analysis and fascinating firsthand accounts of the operation of the system that codified and enshrined racial inequality, this book is required reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of America’s second peculiar institution the future created in its wake.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reed (Without Justice for All), a civil rights activist and professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, interweaves memoir and political analysis in this trenchant history of the Jim Crow South. Born in the Bronx, Reed moved with his parents in the late 1950s to Pine Bluff, Ark., and then to New Orleans, where he attended high school. As a middle-class Black youth, Reed recognized that he was somewhat shielded from the "everyday indignities and atrocities" of Jim Crow. While his family and other "respectable" Black people benefited from advanced education and membership in "an elaborate structure of social clubs," the rural sharecropper children he went to school with were forced to miss months of school during planting season. Reed movingly reflects on how the rules of segregation varied from place to place, causing him to fear as a boy that he might become the next Emmett Till, and vividly evokes 1960s New Orleans, describing the local landmarks and lunch counters he favored and taking note of the "phenotypic gumbo" of south Louisiana, where "passing" as white "was often a straightforwardly pragmatic phenomenon." His emotional description of the removal of New Orleans's Confederate monuments in 2017 underscores the racial progress that was unfathomable to him as a young man. This spare, earnest recollection shines a unique light on the fight for racial equality in America.
