The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives - Adolph L. Reed Jr.

Published in 2022 by Verso, Brooklyn, NY and London, UK

176 pages

ISBN 9781839766268

For many of us who are in the Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z generations in the United States, our experience with the Civil Rights movement and the Jim Crow South is contained mostly in our lessons in history class (if it is even taught at all). We see black and white images of young Ruby Bridges being escorted into class in the first throes of desegregation. We see videos of Civil Rights protestors being attacked and beaten by the police. We listen to the grandiose and beautiful prose of Martin Luther King, the fiery rhetoric of Malcolm X, and the racist screeds of segregationists such as Strom Thurmond and George Wallace. We read many autobiographies of Black Americans in the twentieth century who, upon visiting or passing through the South, came face to face with the bitter realities of Jim Crow.  

Yet, most of us who are alive today do not have distinctive memories of these events. On one hand, when we look at images that are captured in black and white photography, we tend to immediately associate the lack of color with the distant past. These grayscale images create a certain distance from the era, fooling us into thinking that it occurred an exorbitantly long time ago. In reality, the Civil Rights Act was only passed 58 years ago. Even so, as time inevitably marches forward, the last generation that has distinct and well-formed memories of racial segregation in America is slowly dying away. 

As such, it is essential for the lived experiences of those who endured the Jim Crow era to be written and recorded for those of us who never knew such a time and place. In his latest book, The South: Jim Crow and its Afterlives, prolific historian and political theorist Adolf L. Reed Jr. recounts various stories and anecdotes of his time growing up in Jim Crow America. Providing a snapshot of the everyday, quotidian experiences of the segregation era, Reed reveals the cracks and fissures within the hierarchical structure of the Jim Crow South and its legacies that remain with us still today.

Overview:

While we often remember and represent the Jim Crow South through stories of segregated bathrooms, violent police officers, and bigoted politicians, Reed argues that focusing on these images “reduces segregation to its most superficial artifacts, like reducing the image of an iceberg to its visible tip” (6). As such, they often work to obscure the day-to-day quotidian experiences of living in the social order of Jim Crow and obfuscate the underlying economic purposes it served. On one hand, while these images “were never trivial to those who endured them on a daily basis and were never less than massively inconvenient and humiliating” (8), they were the tip of the iceberg of a system of economic exploitation that worked by denying a population their rights as citizens. By leaving the underlying economic exploitation undisturbed, Reed worries that many of our common depictions of the Jim Crow era allow us to comfortably believe that we, by contrast, now live in a “post-racial” society, especially after the election of Obama. 

On the other hand, Reed also cautions us to not fall into the trap of believing that nothing at all has changed from the Jim Crow era. Real and substantive change has been made in the realm of discrimination and racism in American society, even though it often continues in more implicit and hidden ways. Even though racial discrimination and racism persist today, this does not mean that Jim Crow never went away (a subtle critique of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow). 

Rather, it means that the underlying economic system of exploitation that supported the Jim Crow order is continuing unabated, even if the social order itself collapsed. Thus, while the end of segregation allowed a greater share of the black population to enter the middle and upper classes through greater access to education and capital, the economic structure still keeps exploiting and subjugating both black and white workers. Reed argues that our narrow focus on the visible artifacts of segregation causes us to overlook the ways, both subtle and overt, in which black Americans navigated and resisted the Jim Crow social order.

To correct misleading interpretations of the Jim Crow era, Reed draws from various anecdotes of his childhood and early adulthood experiences in Arkansas, Louisiana, and the Carolinas. While Reed was born in the Bronx in 1947, he spent many of his early years in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and New Orleans, Louisiana. While he and his family endured the embarrassments of living under Jim Crow, Reed fully recognizes how his family’s class position mitigated the worst dangers of living under segregation. 

For example, when he was visiting his grandparents in New Orleans as a child, a white zookeeper forbade him and his cousin from riding a pony at the zoo. He and his cousin cried at being deprived of the opportunity while his grandmother scathingly berated the zookeeper to no avail. Reed writes of the zookeeper, “For his part, I presume that, no matter how committed he may or may not have been to Jim Crow personally, he may simply not have wanted to jeopardize his job by breaking the law or convention” (11). 

Later, while riding with his grandmother on Algiers Ferry, they were forced to sit in a particular section of the main deck that was divided from the main deck by chicken wire. When he asked his grandmother why the chicken wire was there, she slyly whispered to him, “Well, you see, a lot of crazy people ride this ferry and they have to sit on the other side” (12). Reed emphasizes the fragility of the Jim Crow order by recounting moments when racial barriers seemed to be more fluid, such as whenever his family would convince his white-passing grandmother to go into a “Whites Only” beignet shop to buy treats for the rest of the family. In such stories, Reed emphasizes the small ways in which black Americans challenged the social order as they continually navigated and negotiated their place within its ever-changing rules.

Other examples, however, were more harrowing and impactful on Reed’s young mind. As a freshman in a New Orleans high school, Reed was caught shoplifting a bag of potato chips from a local store. The threat of being sent to Angola (the state penitentiary) had been used by his family as a deterrent to keep him from bad behavior, and as he sat in front of these white store owners, the word “Angola'' kept running through his terrified mind. Yet, the couple gently sat him down and talked with him as if he were their child, warned him not to steal again, and simply let him go. 

Economic privilege alone, however, was not enough to shield every well-off black American in Jim Crow America. Reed compares his own experience with the story of his friend, who at fifteen years old, rode with a few of his friends in a stolen car and was arrested by police. To make an example out of his friend, the District Attorney’s office decided to try him as an adult. He was convicted and sent to Angola Prison, where, Reed writes, “Within a year, we heard that he was dead” (40). The system’s arbitrariness meant that “middle-class social position and connections couldn’t necessarily be relied upon to divert the system’s horrors' ' (40). 

Yet, even after the official end of the Jim Crow era, its old customs still haunted the South, often displaying themselves in the spontaneous actions of individuals. Reed recounts the experience of being ignored and refused service at a Mississippi airport in 1974, as well as a nurse’s assistant who, in the early 90s, asked Reed’s relative if they could read. He also tells the story of getting shoulder-checked by an older white man in North Carolina, as well as his visceral reaction to being treated with such disdain. For Reed, these incidents represent a transition from the old Jim Crow order to a new one in which the dissolution of legal segregation demanded a new orientation of white people toward black Americans. Jim Crow was always an unstable order, as Reed writes, 

The South within which I came of age -- during the two decades after World War II -- was a period when the white supremacist social order was coming apart at the seams…in large and small ways, black people never stopped challenging its boundaries and constraints… From that perspective, the segregationist order was never stable. It was only the white southern myth of timeless tradition…that gave it the appearance of solidity. (115)

By examining the historical particularities of his own life, Reed attempts to emphasize the historical construction of Jim Crow and its aftermath. Instead of relying on ideological categories such as white supremacy and racism, Reed points out that segregation was enforced on white Americans as well as black Americans, and that focusing on the simple binary of racism/anti-racism reduces the political struggles of the Jim Crow era into a to a perpetual opposition between of black and white Americans. Reed continues, “That perspective compresses historical distinctions between slavery and Jim Crow and ignores the generation of struggle, often enough biracial or interracial, against ruling class power over defining the political and economic character of the post-Emancipation South, as well as the ongoing struggle against and within the new order as it consolidated” (130).

Here, Reed utilizes the example of the removal of Confederate monuments in Louisiana and throughout the rest of the South. While these statues were indeed erected as monuments to a white supremacist political system, their removal does little to ameliorate the economic inequality and suffering of black Americans. While it is indeed a profound symbolic victory, we cannot lead ourselves to believe that this, or even electing black politicians to high positions of power, is enough to overcome the contradictions and exploitations of our capitalist system.

For Reed, his experience of Jim Crow and its aftermath reveals the relationship between continuity and change. The notion that nothing has changed in terms of racial progress in America is ultimately a reactionary view. Against an Afro-Pessimism that essentializes blackness and can only politically manifest in nihilism or black separatism, Reed insists on a socialist, materialist reading of history that prioritizes the role of class antagonism throughout American history. 

The terms on which the white supremacist past has been acknowledged and repudiated actually obscure the sources of inequality and dispossession today. While the segregationist system was clearly and obviously racist and white supremacist, it wasn’t merely about white supremacy for its own sake alone. It was the instrument of a specific order of political and economic power that was clearly racial but that most fundamentally stabilized and reinforced the dominance of powerful political and economic interests (137).

As a historian, Reed hopes to inspire the reader to think about the past in concrete terms so that they can undercut how people use the past for their purposes. Racism is not an eternal and all-pervading force, but rather manifests in response to material conditions. Reed believes that we must view the past with all of its complexities, rather than as an ideologically useful allegory for the present. 

Commendations: 

This insistence on the ambiguity and complexity of the past is one of Reed’s strongest points throughout The South. While Reed complicates our commonly narrow readings of the Jim Crow era, he is also careful to note the specific conditions that shaped his experience. As opposed to many memoirs of the Jim Crow era that narrativize the individual’s triumph and transcendence over an unjust system, Reed’s account complicates notions of the self by placing individual actors in their social and material contexts. 

Individuals are not static objects which assert their identities and selfhood into an unchanging world. Rather, they are fully socialized beings that are constantly negotiating their places within an ever-shifting social order. Reed is careful to note the specificity of his experience, writing “I make no claim to generality, much less universality. I’m very much aware that my perspective is very partial, shaped by where I lived and when, class position and family circumstances, and my age during those years. I’ve tried to keep those and other qualifications in mind and not to overclaim, as well as to be empathetic to other perspectives” (140-141). This epistemic humility is relatively rare among academics, and Reed’s candid appraisal of his own life experiences is refreshingly raw and honest. 

Using his own experiences of the Jim Crow South as a springboard for his critical historical analysis, Reed rightly pushes back against the Afro-Pessimist narrative that dominates certain circles of academia. Rather than deploying the Afro-Pessimist framework which argues that no progress has been made in terms of racial relations, Reed views the history of Jim Crow and its legacy as being much more ambiguous and complex. In contrast, Reed rightly argues that real and substantive change has been made since the Civil Rights era and the dissolution of Jim Crow, even though the undergirding system of capitalism has remained untouched. 

Indeed, The South seems to be a direct refutation of Frank Wilderson III’s 2020 book, Afro-pessimism. Also written as part memoir, part political treatise, Wilderson’s work consists of various stories from his own life that illustrate how blackness is constantly degraded and subjected to violence. From the Afro-Pessimist framework, enslavement is not merely a historical class relation that arose from material conditions, but rather a wholly totalizing and all-compassing social and psychological trauma that can never be overcome. Blackness, in this view, is an ontological category of total alienation from the rest of humanity (including other historically oppressed populations), which forecloses any notion of solidarity across racial divides. This philosophy accepts the reality of race as an ontological reality, and it essentializes and flattens the experience of blackness regardless of geographic, historical, social, and economic differences. 

The only political solutions that Afro-Pessimism offers are either black separatism/nationalism or total nihilism. Indeed, Wilderson comes to an apocalyptic fatalist conclusion in his work, writing that the degradation of black life is endemic to humanity, and that “the end of this generative mechanism would mean the end of the world” (Afropressimism, p. 252). For Wilderson, giving into this fatalism is revolutionary in itself, and one can only hope that something new might grow from the ashes of a fire-soaked earth. 

As opposed to this philosophical stance, Reed instead insists on a fully socialist perspective that unites workers across racial lines. Whereas Wilderson takes his own experiences of anti-blackness as normative and descriptive of the black experience across the globe, Reed recognizes the limitations of his own lived experience and makes no pretense that his experience is normative and indicative of a metaphysical, ontological condition of blackness. Rather than getting trapped in a narcissistic, separatist perspective, Reed extends empathy to anyone who has been exploited by the economic system in which we live. 

Reed also emphasizes how oppressed populations resisted their degradation and alienation from the social order. From a historical perspective, enslaved and oppressed populations have always continued to accommodate, resist, negotiate and reinvent themselves within their socio-political contexts. Reed’s analysis is a fantastic example of this constant negotiation under conditions of oppression. By refusing to give in to the Afro-Pessimist insistence on the eternal ontological degradation of blackness, Reed shifts our focus onto the historically-contingent nature of racism in America and its material consequences that continue to this day. 

Critique: 

On the other hand, many of these rhetorical rebuffs to Afro-Pessimism and race-essentialism are unlikely to be caught by the casual reader. Throughout the text, Reed often neglects to name those to which he is responding (such as Frank Wilderson III, Ibram X Kendi, Robin Di Angelo, Michelle Alexander, and the 1619 Project), which can lend a frustratingly vague character to Reed’s otherwise incisive and sharp critique. 

Reed’s fiery polemics also lead him to stretch a few of his claims. For example, as a born and raised North Carolinian, I found a few details of Reed’s recounting of the history of Fayetteville to be inaccurate. As opposed to Reed’s claim, the Fayetteville Market House was not destroyed in the Civil War by Union troops only to be rebuilt by the city Fathers as a way to show their domination over the black population (53-54). Rather, the original city legislature was burned in a massive fire that consumed much of the city in 1831, a full 30 years before the Civil War. The structure was then rebuilt the following year and has been there since. 

I have tried to find a source as to where Reed may have gotten his claim that it was destroyed in the Civil War by Union troops, but have come across no such evidence. It seems to be the kind of story that is passed down orally, and then is reified through subsequent retelling, but has little basis in reality. To be fair, the larger point that the building of the slave market was obviously used to subjugate black people is unquestionably true, yet it was not an overtly intentional post-Civil War action as Reed claims it was.

Furthermore, Reed’s section on the instrumentality of “passing” will likely provoke the ire of some readers. Reed and his relatives would sometimes make his white-passing grandmother purchase sugary treats from a whites-only beignet shop since she was the only one who could pass as white. While Reed is ultimately making the point that passing was “a straightforwardly pragmatic phenomenon” for black Americans to negotiate their place in Jim Crow America, he also doesn’t engage with any critique of passing and its deleterious effects. 

Instead, he simply dismisses these critiques of passing as “the stuff of the overwrought morality play rehearsed in films, literature, and the ruminations of race-conscious commentators of all sorts” (92). After recounting various stories of friends and relatives using passing to skip streetcar lines or to acquire hamburgers and strawberry ice cream sodas, Reed writes, 

Neither my grandmother nor her expatriate daughter experienced any existential anxiety…in momentarily passing to get a box of beignets. To be sure, both were irked by the injustice and irrationality of the racial order that made deception necessary for even so trivial an act, but neither considered for an instant that perpetrating that deception reflected at all on her values or identity. It was an instrumental act, even if perhaps a rather distasteful one. (99). 

Here, Reed runs the same risk as Wilderson by taking his own familial experience of the triviality of passing as universal. By dismissing how black writers have written about their subjective experience of passing as existentially rupturing, Reed can sometimes veer too far in the other direction in his polemics

This is further made evident when he judges the Haliwa-Saponi tribe’s attempts to achieve federal recognition as “pathetic,” since he argues that they failed to see the instability of the Jim Crow order and “assumed that operating within its precepts could be more advantageous than would turn out to be correct” (88). Rather than moralizing the actions of the Haliwa-Saponi, it would be more beneficial to build solidarity and take their attempts as an example of the different ways in which different minority groups attempted to navigate the Jim Crow order and the fluid, ever-changing definitions of racial identity in the post-Crow South. While I fully agree with Reed’s emphasis on class analysis, those who already dismiss Reed as a class reductionist will likely not find much reason to change their perspective. 

Conclusion:

Overall, The South is a deeply insightful firsthand account of Jim Crow and the legacy it has left in its wake. While its short length makes it far from a comprehensive history of the Jim Crow South, Reed’s analysis of the continuing class antagonisms that remain after its dissolution is a salient and much-needed corrective. Reed’s memory of the Jim Crow era is nuanced and full of vivid texture, and as the last generation who experienced it firsthand is dying away, such an account is becoming increasingly valuable. Reed reminds us that while real progress has been made since the fall of Jim Crow, the enduring legacy of economic inequality that undergirded it remains with us still today. Abolishing legal segregation in America was only the beginning, and Reed offers us not only a clearsighted vision of our shared past but also a hope that we can create a more just and equitable future.