Adolph L. Reed

Dr Adolph L. Reed, Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, a former faculty member at Yale, Northwestern, and the New School for Social Research, and a prolific writer, whose work focuses mainly on American politics, race, and inequality. He was born in the Bronx in 1947, and he and his family moved to New Orleans when he was a child, where he lived until he matriculated at the University of North Carolina in the late 1960s. He recalls his childhood spent in New Orleans and with relatives in Arkansas, and this forms the background of this book, which evaluates the institution of legal segregation and discrimination against African Americans from the post-Reconstruction period until the mid 1960s, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 began the dismantling of the Jim Crow system that crippled the aspirations of Black people and enforced White supremacy in the Deep South for more than 75 years.

The book begins in the early 2000s, as Dr Reed returns to the South after having left it during the beginning of the Ronald Reagan presidency, and marvels at how the region has changed dramatically in two decades, yet remained the same in many ways. Blacks were now in positions of power in politics, medicine and other professions, but the old order and many of its customs still persisted.

For me the most interesting part of the book was his description of growing up in New Orleans in the 1950s and 1960s, when schools, neighborhoods, public accommodations and places of business were segregated to varying degrees. As a child of the middle class in a large, diverse and relatively tolerant Southern city he and his family were protected from the worst aspects of Jim Crow, although segregation and discrimination were still constantly present until the mid 1960s, and still persisted until at least the early 1970s in smaller towns in Arkansas and Louisiana. He subsequently describes harrowing experiences as a passenger on public transportation in the mid 1960s, when legal segregation had ended but local practices of discrimination against African Americans persisted, and his life as an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when Black student enrollment at UNC was relatively small but increasing rapidly, and fear of Black men on campus by White women and resultant false reports of crimes committed by them were on the rise. He was involved with the Civil Rights and anti-war movements as an undergraduate student, which he continued when he and his wife moved to Fayetteville, North Carolina, followed by Atlanta, where he earned his PhD at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University).

In later chapters Dr Reed discusses the cultural changes that took place in the South, the dissolution of the importance of Black skin color as a marker of status, along with the phenomenon of “passing,” as some of the lightest skinned African Americans passed as White in order to obtain jobs and participate freely in other activities that were shut off to them as Blacks under Jim Crow, the dismantling of public monuments in New Orleans which honored the Confederacy such as the Robert E. Lee Monument that was visible every time I took the St Charles streetcar from the Tulane University campus to the Central Business District when I was a student there in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the resurgence of White supremacy, pride in the Confederacy and overt racism during the Trump administration.

I’ve spent nearly half of my life in the Deep South, three years in New Orleans and nearly 25 years in Atlanta, and in both cities I was able to attend universities (Tulane and Emory), live in neighborhoods, and work, as a hospital-based pediatrician, in places that would have been impossible for me as an African American during my childhood, which is a testament to the monumental changes that have taken place. On the other hand there is a backlash that is currently underway in many cities and states, as politicians are making it more difficult for Blacks to vote, books by African American authors are being banned by school districts, and the teaching of American history, the Civil Rights Movement and racism is being restricted by those who want to protect their children from learning the truth about the pervasive effects of discrimination in the past as well as the present day.

The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives is a superb contribution to African American history, and it would be of great interest to anyone who lived in the Deep South in general or New Orleans in particular during and after the Jim Crow era.… (más)