What Living Under Jim Crow Was Like In New Orleans (w/ Adolph Reed)

“What I didn’t realize at the time was that what I was living through was the death paroxysms of the Jim Crow order.” — Adolph Reed

Prof. Adolph Reed Jr. has been called (by Cornel West) “the towering radical theorist of American democracy of his generation.” His new book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives is a departure from Reed’s previous work in political science, as it is a personal reflection on his upbringing as part of the last generation to experience the Jim Crow south firsthand. Reed grew up mostly in New Orleans (where this interview also took place) and vividly recalls both the everyday realities of the Jim Crow order and the remarkable process by which the regime was shattered. His book discusses what has changed and what hasn’t in the South. Today he joins to discuss the book and tell us more about how the Jim Crow order functioned in practice, what brought it to an end, and how seismic historical changes happen (sometimes much more quickly than you expect).

Adolph Reed’s previous appearance on the program can be heard here and watched here. He mentions the book Black Masters, and the Supreme Court cases Grovey v. Townsend and Smith v. Allwright. Ben Burgis' review of Prof. Reed's book for Current Affairs is here. The 2020 controversy over Reed's DSA talk is reported on here. The Preston Smith article Prof. Reed mentions is here. 

“When I’m out in different places in the South and see groups of coworkers or neighborhood friends at a Chili’s or TGI Fridays, they’re having drinks and a meal convivially—that doesn’t say anything major about who’s inclined to vote for socialism but that’s a level of complex experience and conviviality that wouldn’t have been possible before 1968.” — Adolph Reed