The South, Adolph L. Reed, Jr.
The South, Adolph L. Reed, Jr.
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The South
Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

Author: Adolph L. Reed, Jr., Barbara J. Fields

Narrator: Langston Darby

Unabridged: 4 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/31/2022

Synopsis

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. 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.

About Adolph L. Reed, Jr.

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by a on January 29, 2022

This short book is primarily a series of recollections in which Reed shows the interplay between social structure and lived reality during the waning years and immediate aftermath of the Jim Crow south. He illustrates why people don’t act as courageously as we would often like, how bucking ingrained......more

Goodreads review by robin on February 13, 2025

Change And Continuity In The Jim Crow South Adolph Reed Jr., Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, has written extensively on race and American politics, including a study of DuBois, "W.E.B DuBois and American Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line" (1997). Influen......more

Goodreads review by Luke on March 22, 2022

Having read Reed's essay's I expected this to be halfway between and academic treatise and a polemic screed (which I would have been fine with). Instead, what I got was a touching and relatable series of vignettes about life in the south under Jim Crow, plucked from his personal experience, and effe......more

Goodreads review by David on March 02, 2022

Adolph Reed Jr. is the most important--has been the most important--American intellectual who explores the nexus of race and political economy. This is an interesting book because it isn't until the end of it that Reed starts flexing his intellectual muscle. Which is not to the say the first ⅚ of th......more

Goodreads review by Adam on March 06, 2022

"Longevity can be a source of corrective optimism. I recall an occasion early in the George W. Bush presidency when my friend and former physician, Quentin Young, was confronted at a talk by a medical student who lamented that she couldn't imagine being able to win any progressive objectives because......more

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