The South

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… Keep Reading