Like his criticisms of Obama or The 1619 Project, Reed's perspectives on Jim Crow are both incisive and incendiary. In The South, Reed recounts growing up in New Orleans while blending in his analysis of segregation. Part memoir, part history, and part political treatise, The South chronicles Reed's life under Jim Crow to correct what he sees as misleading representations of the past. and claim that little has changed since the days of Jim Crow, Reed shows the folly of such a conclusion Jason Sokol, If some observers today are tempted to look at the racial injustices that still abound. He is speaking directly to the errors of today, which threaten to calcify the reality of the past into doctrinaire historical misunderstandings. Reed seeks to delineate exactly what Jim Crow was and wasn't.

Publishers WeeklyĪ remembrance of the author's early life below the Mason-Dixon line, while also making a case for class-based inequality as a historical constant Aaron Bogart,

trenchant history of the Jim Crow South.This spare, earnest recollection shines a unique light on the fight for racial equality in America. ReviewsĮrasing the Color Line Christopher Hitchens, With a foreword from Barbara Fields, co-author of the acclaimed Racecraft. 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. The South is more than a memoir or a history. The South unravels the personal and political dimensions of the Jim Crow order, revealing the sources and objectives of this unstable regime, its contradictions and precarity, and the social order that would replace it. 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. Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. New Orleanian, political scientist, and according to Cornel West, “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.

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. The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear.

The South by Adolph L. Reed Jr.