The South

[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 *
[A] necessary corrective to some current discussions of race and inequality and provides a foundation for a more effective oppositional politics. – Ben Clarke * Cleveland Review of Books *

Adolph L. Reed Jr. is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. He has held positions at Yale, Northwestern, and the New School. Reed’s scholarship has focused on race, American politics, and inequality. He is a contributing editor to The New Republic and has been a frequent contributor to Harpers, The Nation, and Jacobin.

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