The South

Praise

“Adolph L. Reed Jr.’s work has long been characterized by its sharp, incisive analysis, counterintuitiveinsights, and wit. In the spirit of Jean Toomer’s Cane, Reed vividly captures the essence of a signal aspectof the African American tradition, a world known as “the Black Belt,” a world that is passing, a world inits final phase of transition, one that all-too-soon will vanish.  This riveting book is essential reading foranyone seeking to understand how the forces that shaped our complex racial past persist in shaping,and obscuring, our racial present.”
– Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

“Adolph Reed Jr. is the towering radical theorist of American democracy of his generation! This powerfuland needful book is a rare gem—a rich intervention in our present discourse in light of an unsettlingreflection on the recent past!”
– Cornel West, Union Theological and Princeton University

“Through decades as a political activist, journalist, scholar, and teacher, Adolph Reed has consistentlyadvocated a serious, historically grounded, and genuinely progressive politics. Attentive readers of thefollowing pages will learn how he arrived at his understanding of the past, his analysis of the present, hisdiagnosis of where politics has gone astray, and his prescription for where it needs to go from here.They may well, as a result, be inspired to think anew about the prospects for building a more humaneworld—and the steps, in thought and in action, that will be required to bring it about.”
– Barbara J. Fields, Columbia University

“At a moment when professional and popular commentary about race and inequality is all too ready todraw neat and misleading analogies between the past and present, Reed’s recounting and examinationof everyday encounters during the waning decades of this important period of American life enables usto see what made the Jim Crow era distinctive.  In doing so, he helps us to see, and to understand, whathas and hasn’t changed about the role of race in American life.” 
– Kenneth W. Warren, University of Chicago

“[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