Adolph Reed, who is a University of Pennsylvania emeritus professor of political science, hails from the last generation that consciously experienced the Jim Crow system. Born in 1947, he grew up in segregated New Orleans and Arkansas in middle-class circumstances. Though his family came from the South on both sides, he spent some early years in New York and Washington, D.C., where he attended an integrated elementary school. Moreover, since his family traveled extensively in the South, he often had to be reminded of the local variations of Jim Crow: Segregation rules thus never became second nature to him. He recalls an episode from his childhood when he took the New Orleans ferry with his grandmother. The deck was bifurcated by chicken wire, with whites on one side and blacks on the other. He asked his grandmother why that was. She replied in a tone meant to be overheard by the white people in front: “Well, you see, a lot of crazy people ride this ferry, and they have to sit on the other side.”
Reed’s new book, The South, proceeds from Reed’s reminiscences of quotidian life under Jim Crow and the years of its dissolution, but it is no memoir. Its purpose is to make points. Reed comes from the Marxist Left. He thus views the Jim Crow system not merely as the outgrowth of racial ideology but also as class oppression. One of his leitmotifs is that class interests, specifically employment and production relations, were fundamental to Jim Crow. “While the segregationist system was clearly and obviously racist and white supremacist,” he writes, “it wasn’t merely about white supremacy for its own sake alone.” The ruling elites used white supremacy as an instrument of political and economic power to secure their own class privileges, hence it was “as much a cover story as a concrete program.”
Reed has spent a long time trying (and mostly failing) to lead the Left by example out of the slogan-based politics that it has fallen into. He wants to focus on real examination of the economic forces that produce oppression. To represent racism as a constant factor in American history risks obscuring those very forces, he warns. He is thus contemptuous of those who “self-righteously announce the obvious and offer only unthinkably remote, millennial routes to justice like ‘revolution’ or ‘unity’ (or now, reparations).”
It was Jim Crow, Reed argues, not slavery, that has had “the most immediate consequences for contemporary life and the connection between race and politics in the South and, less directly, the rest of the country.” He is fittingly stern when it comes to partisan revisionism of that history. On one side, he opposes the narrative retailed by racial nationalists, including Malcolm X, that the real problem “was not the principle of ‘separate but equal’ but the fact that it wasn’t properly enforced.” This view misunderstands the foundation of the Jim Crow regime — there would be no point in separating equals.
One cannot make sense of the segregation era using “a simple racism/anti-racism framework,” Reed writes. To illustrate this point, he recounts how he was treated by local whites when he worked with the Soul City project in Warren County, North Carolina, in the early 1970s. The project had secured federal funding and promised to bring more commerce to the county. Moreover, its personnel earned far more than the locals. The Warren County officials accepted their new black class peers as equals while they treated “other blacks in ways continuous with the old order.” The implication, Reed notes, is that if “whites’ commitments to racism or white supremacy produce such radically different practical expressions, then we have to question how much such commitments really explain.”
Reed comments that no one in 1950, not even the wildest optimist, seriously thought that the Jim Crow system would be broken within 15 years. It crumbled far faster than what had seemed possible. He recounts a telling incident in 1973 when, late one evening, his car was stopped by a South Carolina state trooper. The trooper hadn’t stopped him for speeding but because he was curious to know what his bumper sticker meant. The sticker read “boycott” with the Gulf Oil logo, referring to Gulf Oil’s funding of Portugal’s colonial wars in Africa in return for drilling rights in Angola’s Cabinda province. Thus, Reed writes that he “had to give an impromptu account of the persistence of Portuguese colonialism in Africa and Gulf’s complicity in sustaining it.”
Jim Crow’s corpse would still kick and twitch in death, though. Reed recalls an episode in the spring of 1966 when he had to wait several hours for his connecting flight at a small airport near El Dorado, Arkansas. Since segregation had been outlawed, there were no signs indicating which waiting room was which. There had been a recent string of killings of civil rights supporters, so the wrong choice might very well prove fatal. So he chose a bench outside. “If I’d run across the wrong individuals on the wrong day or given off the wrong vibes, I could have disappeared and been dropped, without a trace, into the Ouachita River.”
Reed’s family, like many others, chose to patronize shops largely based on how much racial indignity it would entail. They bought almost all their menswear at a store with an egalitarian-minded Mexican sales manager, but most often, Reed writes, “it was necessary to make imperfect choices: was it a greater affront to be denied the right to try on hats or shoes?” Yet some treats were too precious to forgo, such as a brand of strawberry fountain sodas that could only be found at a segregated lunch counter.
Being part of the bourgeoisie meant that one could mitigate some of the worst aspects of Jim Crow, yet white supremacy could at any time override that class status. When Reed, in his youth, was caught shoplifting, the two white proprietors told him off in a manner “more like concerned parents or relatives than as intimidating or hostile storekeepers.” But being from a “respectable” background was no blanket protection. A little later, one of Reed’s high school friends was arrested while joyriding in a stolen car. The district attorney’s office, ignoring the parents’ pleas, prosecuted him as an adult. He was sent to the infamous Angola prison, where he died within a year.
“We were all unequal,” Reed writes, “but some were more unequal and unprotected than others.” The black middle class created social clubs, fraternities, and sororities to insulate themselves from the lower classes. “From the system’s beginnings a complaint about the injustice of enforced segregation was that it didn’t provide for class distinctions among black people,” Reed notes. Thus, one of the claims in Plessy’s brief to the Supreme Court was that segregation precluded “respectable” black people from first-class seating. Indeed, Reed remarks, both Anna Julia Cooper and the young W.E.B. Du Bois raised similar class-based objections.
Perhaps the chief strength of The South is how Reed captures both the region’s change and continuity. In the early years of this century, when he revisited the South for the first time since the Reagan presidency, he “was constantly struck by how much the ways that things had changed in the region seemed to underscore the ways they hadn’t, and, vice versa, how the ways things haven’t changed underscore the ways they have.” The South manages to make sense of that apparent contradiction: Reed is a pleasure to read for his ideological allies and enemies because of his talent for focusing on what materially matters and discarding the symbolic dross.
Gustav Jönsson is a Swedish freelance writer based in the United Kingdom.
