Book Review

The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

by Adolph L. Reed, Jr.

Verso, 2022. 160 pages, $24.95 hardcover.

This is an interesting narrative account of the South's long history of Jim Crow as people actually experienced it. This is important to relate because the last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon pass on. The Jim Crow era's segregation order was complex and an apartheid system. This book uses first-hand individual stories and analysis to illuminate its legal framework, systems of power, and the way these systems structured the daily interactions, lives, and fates of ordinary working people. Reed's book includes a foreword from Barbara Fields, co-author of the excellent Racecraft:The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Verso, 2014) - which also is reviewed in this Blog.

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.

Cordially Invites You To "Doing The Work" Exhibit Opening Celebrating 50 Years of the Maryland Commission on African American History & Culture (MCAAHC)

Saturday, August 10 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm Banneker-Douglass Museum 84 Franklin Street, Annapolis, MD 21401  The Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture’s mission to discover, document, preserve, collect, and promote Maryland’s African American heritage is demonstrated through its educational and public programs, preservation and funding programs, and the collections housed by the Banneker-Douglass Museum (BDM). This exhibit showcases ephemera, photographs, and archival documents to detail the history and impact of MCAAHC. Doing the Work invites visitors to learn about the Commission’s impact on their local communities and consider their personal role in preserving Maryland’s African American heritage. Click here to register.