Promotional Information

A narrative account of Jim Crow as people experienced it.

About the Author

Adolph Reed Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a contributing editor to The New Republic and has been a frequent contributor to Harpers, The Nation, and Jacobin.

Reviews

Erasing the Color Line
*New York Times*

[A] trenchant history of the Jim Crow South....This spare, earnest recollection shines a unique light on the fight for racial equality in America.
*Publishers Weekly*

A 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
*White Review, Best Books 2022*

Reed seeks to delineate exactly what Jim Crow was and wasn't. He is speaking directly to the errors of today, which threaten to calcify the reality of the past into doctrinaire historical misunderstandings.
*Arts Fuse*

If some observers today are tempted to look at the racial injustices that still abound... and claim that little has changed since the days of Jim Crow, Reed shows the folly of such a conclusion
*Washington Post*

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.
*Bookforum*

In The South, Reed recounts growing up in New Orleans while blending in his analysis of segregation. Like his criticisms of Obama or The 1619 Project, Reed's perspectives on Jim Crow are both incisive and incendiary.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*

Reed has added nuance and insight to understanding the segregated South as it came to a formal end.
*Southern Spaces*