Grady Ormsby's Reviews > The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

History has meaning. Typically, a historian attaches meaning to events, personalities, trends, and policies by commenting on the effects those things had on the world, the nation, various groups, and individual people. Other historians might open debate as to the validity, relevance, and completeness of those interpretations. In The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives by Adolph L. Reed, Jr. the author attaches his own personal life. Well researched and intelligently expressed, Reed’s history is in the form of a memoir. Besides being a historical description, it is also a story of Reed’s family and his growing up. The book focuses on the genesis, development, and ultimate decline of Jim Crow, America’s apartheid.

Through decades as a political activist, journalist, scholar, and teacher, Adolph Reed has consistently advocated serious, historically grounded, progressive politics. He is well known for his views about anti-reductionism. Race reductionism is the presumption that race as a category can explain social phenomena and that every grievance, injustice, complaint that in any way affects a person of color, can be reduced to race or racism. A classical Marxist, Reed prefers that such blame be assigned to class.

He is often the target of criticism. However, Cornel West, a Harvard professor of philosophy and a Socialist, has stated, “God have mercy, Adolph is the greatest democratic theorist of his generation. He has taken some very unpopular stands on identity politics, but he has a track record of a half-century.”

I can’t resist the temptation for a bit of name-dropping. Adolph was a friend of mine when we were in Chapel Hill.