Adolph Reed Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. His most recent books are No Politics but Class Politics, co-authored with Walter Benn Michaels, and Black Studies, Cultural Politics and the Evasion of Inequality, co-authored with Kenneth W. Warren. He is a regular on the Class Matters podcast - classmatterspodcast.org.

Schedule

10:00 am to 10:45 am
State Library, Third Floor
Whose South, Whose Story: What Hath Jim Crow Wrought?
Wendy A. Gaudin, Sunset Limited: An Autobiography of Creole
Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives
with moderator Maurice Carlos Ruffin

11:00 am to 11:45 am
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

"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

A memoir and historical account of growing up Black in the Jim Crow South

The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but not a nuanced understanding of everyday life in Jim Crow America. In The South, Adolph L. Reed Jr. — New Orleanian, political scientist, and, according to Cornel West, “the greatest democratic theorist of his generation” — takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South.

Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. Thanks to his personal history and political acumen, we see America’s apartheid system from the ground up, not just its legal framework or systems of power, but the way these systems structured the day-to-day interactions, lives, and ambitions of ordinary working people.

The South unravels the personal and political dimensions of the Jim Crow order, revealing the sources and objectives of this unstable regime, its contradictions and weakness, and the social order that would replace it.

The South is more than a memoir or a history. Filled with analysis and fascinating firsthand accounts, this book is required reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of America's second peculiar institution and the future created in its wake.