The South - by Adolph L Reed (Paperback)

About the Book

"Adolph L. Reed Jr.-- 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"--

Book Synopsis

"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."
-Elias Rodriques, Bookforum

A memoir and historical account of growing up Black in the Jim Crow South

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. -- 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.

Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. Thanks to 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 unravels the personal and political dimensions of the Jim Crow order, revealing the sources and objectives of this unstable regime, its contradictions and weakness, and the social order that would replace it.

The South is more than a memoir or a history. Filled with analysis and fascinating firsthand accounts, this book is required reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of America's second peculiar institution and the future created in its wake.

Review Quotes

"[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"
--Aaron Bogart, 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."
--Jeremy Ray Jewell, 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"
--Jason Sokol, 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."
--Elias Rodriques, 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."
--Jonah Goldman Kay, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Reed has added nuance and insight to understanding the segregated South as it came to a formal end."
--Steve Suitts, Southern Spaces

"[A] necessary corrective to some current discussions of race and inequality and provides a foundation for a more effective oppositional politics."
--Ben Clarke, Cleveland Review of Books

About the Author

Adolph Reed Jr. is a leading scholar of race, American politics, and inequality. Reed is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, and has held positions at Yale, Northwestern, and the New School. He is a lifelong organizer and public intellectual, a contributing editor at The New Republic, and a frequent contributor to Harpers and The Nation.