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Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South
This “viscerally powerful . . . compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era” won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review). Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Oral History Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever compiled of African American life under segregation. Men and women from all walks of life tell how their most ordinary activities were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression. Yet Remembering Jim Crow is also a testament to how black southerners fought back against systemic racism—building churches and schools, raising children, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. The result is a powerful story of individual and community survival.
400 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 1, 2000
208 people are currently reading
2668 people want to read
About the author
William Henry Chafe
28 books21 followersWilliam Chafe is an American historian, and currently the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History at Duke University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 50 reviews
October 16, 2015
I really enjoyed reading the stories in this book. I feel like a huge part of my history was missed out when I was in school. We learned about slavery and that it was bad and we learned a bit about desegregation but we weren't really taught about the stuff in between. Of course, I suppose it makes sense that institutionalised racism isn't going to be taught by an institution that institutionalised racism. I hope that more of my white American brothers and sisters will read this to understand what it was like for our African American brothers and sisters after slavery was abolished and to perhaps understand our current racial climate. Things need to change and for that to happen people need to listen to reach other.
These stories are told in a matter of fact kind of way which, for me, made it worse. This is just the way things were and the people who lived through these times just had to deal with it. I found these stories to be very powerful and moving.
These stories are told in a matter of fact kind of way which, for me, made it worse. This is just the way things were and the people who lived through these times just had to deal with it. I found these stories to be very powerful and moving.
May 7, 2017
This is a very important project/book where the stories of those who lived through the Jim Crow era are recorded. This book was the primary text assigned for a course I took on "The Age of Segregation."
Jim Crow was a brutal and disgusting time period, and it's one which needs to be studied by every American. In terms of what this book is, I would actually recommend this as a supplementary material rather than primary. These are the stories of people, often briefly told, that highlight and detail a specific component of how the Jim Crow era was. If you're looking for a book which overviews Jim Crow and gets into how it progressed/contested resistance and progressive change, then this is not the book (I highly recommend "Parchman" Farm for that).
This is an essential work. These are the voices of people who went through a damn terrible period of American history, and they are telling the immediate, specific, and empirical details of how this time was for themselves. Within this book are the thousands of details a history book won't be able to show; these are the real Stories of that period, and they are each deserving of their place here in this book.
Jim Crow was a brutal and disgusting time period, and it's one which needs to be studied by every American. In terms of what this book is, I would actually recommend this as a supplementary material rather than primary. These are the stories of people, often briefly told, that highlight and detail a specific component of how the Jim Crow era was. If you're looking for a book which overviews Jim Crow and gets into how it progressed/contested resistance and progressive change, then this is not the book (I highly recommend "Parchman" Farm for that).
This is an essential work. These are the voices of people who went through a damn terrible period of American history, and they are telling the immediate, specific, and empirical details of how this time was for themselves. Within this book are the thousands of details a history book won't be able to show; these are the real Stories of that period, and they are each deserving of their place here in this book.
August 30, 2024
An excellent book that covers a dark period of US history. After the Civil War, there were white Americans who were not happy that African American slaves had been emancipated and given rights. What followed was a cruel set of laws known as Jim Crow. There are things I learned about Jim Crow I had never even known before. These laws were cruel, dehumanizing, immoral, and absurd.
What I liked about this book was the editor let the people interviewed tell their stories. There is commentary about the people interviewed and some history is provided, but the heart of this book is everyday African Americans sharing their time during the Jim Crow Era. It is not an easy book to read because it is just one inhumane story after another. The stories are terrifying, but one was just absolutely asinine. One of the people interviewed said Blacks could not get Coca-Cola, they could only buy Pepsi. If you teach US history or African American, this book can be used as primary source in your classes.
What I liked about this book was the editor let the people interviewed tell their stories. There is commentary about the people interviewed and some history is provided, but the heart of this book is everyday African Americans sharing their time during the Jim Crow Era. It is not an easy book to read because it is just one inhumane story after another. The stories are terrifying, but one was just absolutely asinine. One of the people interviewed said Blacks could not get Coca-Cola, they could only buy Pepsi. If you teach US history or African American, this book can be used as primary source in your classes.
October 22, 2009
A bit repetitive, but what this book does disturbingly, hauntingly well is to strip away the mere offhanded regret it is easy to feel over the Jim Crow era and reveal the phenomenon for what it was and is: an American Holocaust, no less shocking or brutal than the horrors of Nazi Germany. Books like this -- plain, unvarnished accounts of everyday life -- cut to the very heart of what the study of history is supposed to accomplish: a warning against evil and a memorial to its victims.
December 10, 2010
A really great book shows us how everything is great and worth to die for
November 13, 2021
I am so glad the Behind the Veil project took place at Duke University and led to this book, which contains priceless first person oral history accounts of African Americans who lived during the Jim Crow era, lending very personal and individual accounts of what life was truly like for them. This should be required reading for every American.
July 21, 2022
Excellent Resource
This is a collection of interviews with African Americans who lived during the Jim Crow years. The years range from the 1890s up though the 1960s. It’s an oral history. A great plus are audio recordings included to hear the real voices of people interviewed. Provides a lot of insight into life at that time.
This is a collection of interviews with African Americans who lived during the Jim Crow years. The years range from the 1890s up though the 1960s. It’s an oral history. A great plus are audio recordings included to hear the real voices of people interviewed. Provides a lot of insight into life at that time.
November 3, 2017
A vicious society
Every American should read this book. It’s puzzling how a nation whose citizens believed that they are the freest people of the world could produce one of the most vicious societies the ever existed.
Every American should read this book. It’s puzzling how a nation whose citizens believed that they are the freest people of the world could produce one of the most vicious societies the ever existed.
June 29, 2017
Ann outgrowth of Duke University's project , Behind the Veil. this records the stories of the Jim Crow era. Good bibliography in the back
December 11, 2018
Amazing stories told by Black Americans who lived through the Jim Crow era.
May 13, 2018
An important read which helps explain current injustices.
March 8, 2024
So far this year I have read NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE and SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME: THE RE-ENSLAVEMENT OF BLACK AMERICANS FROM THE CIVIL WAR TO WORLD WAR II by Douglas Blackmon. Both were difficult reads, in the sense that they are extremely upsetting and—for someone who writes Goodreads reviews regularly—brimming with powerful quotes and facts which made sorting through my copious notes to write a summary/review of these books a time-consuming prospect. I sort of wanted to take a break from books of that heft for a little while, but then it was February, a.k.a. Black History Month and it felt appropriate to make it a trilogy. Where the first of these books was about life during the period of open slavery in the United States and the second took place in the immediate aftermath, this third book—REMEMBERING JIM CROW: AFRICAN AMERICANS TALK ABOUT LIFE IN THE SEGREGATED SOUTH—is mostly about events occurring in the 20th century, largely the 1920s through 1940s.
Though I worried it would be another emotionally draining yet richly detailed book, I was nonetheless eager to read this title because I anticipated that it would be very good. It’s memories of what it was like to live through the Jim Crow era, from the perspective of Black Americans… and it’s told in their own voices! That is, the book is a collection of transcripts from interviews with people about their lived experiences during the period of de jure segregation. In an introduction, the premise is laid out plainly: “[L]ittle has been written about the actual experience of black Americans during the age of segregation . . . There was no larger sense of what occurred in the everyday lives of blacks from the 1890s through the onset of World War II. Instead of being understood as a time of complexity and struggle, the Jim Crow era appeared as a barren wasteland of oppression. It was almost as though the Stanley Elkins model of a ‘closed system’, with no outlets, that had once been applied to slavery, now had become the prism through which we understood the era of Jim crow. Oversimplified, static, and without nuance, the historiography of Jim Crow became a tale of total oppression, on the one hand, and passive submission, on the other.”
Certainly there was a pervasive, daily terror that Black Americans faced from cruel whites. The intro cites examples from later in the book: “[T]he man who told of his brother being killed in the middle of the night because he had not sufficiently deferred in the presence of a white man, another story of an African-American being dragged to his death behind a horse-drawn wagon or a pregnant wife having her womb slit, with both mother and child killed, because her husband allegedly had offended a white woman. From lynching to being denied the right to be called ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’, to having cars or school buses intentionally hit puddles of water to splash black people walking, there was neither escape from, nor redress for, the ubiquitous, arbitrary, and cruel reality of senseless white power.” However, despite this, the introduction argues that the real lesson the book imparts is not simply how extreme unchecked white cruelty had been, but instead “the extraordinary resilience of black citizens who, individually and collectively, found ways to endure, fight back, and occasionally define their own destinies” and the remarkable “capacity of the black community o come to each other’s aid and invent means of sustaining the collective will to survive and perhaps even inch forward.”
All of this seems so immediate and vital. Surely hearing first-hand accounts of the severity of the oppression experienced and how black people maintained their lives and their sanity under such conditions would be hugely powerful. This seemed to have all the makings of an incredible, very important book. Unfortunately, I was disappointed with it. In the final analysis, I’d give the book 3.5 stars except that Goodreads doesn’t allow for half-stars (at time of writing).
The thing is—yes, hearing directly from people who lived through this period of American history and were personally impacted by it is stirring, at times. But the problem with presenting unedited transcripts of interviews with elderly folks is that they are not especially illustrative, eloquent, or concise. Many of the interviewees tend to ramble and repeat themselves, veer from topic to topic without much organization, give too much focus to inconsequential minutiae, and describe events in broad, ambiguous terms. I only saved one example to show the sort of thing I’m talking about, but trust me that this is endemic to the whole: “We were able to go to the movies down here at Drakesboro when we lived at Browder. The blacks went upstairs and the white was downstairs. It was 10 cents to get in, I think. And you got a hamburger for five cents and a bottle of pop for five cents. So if you had about a quarter, it would do it all. Well, you had to have 50 cents, a quarter for the girl and a quarter for yourself. Oh, I can remember. Central City was the same price too. It was 10 cents to ride the bus, 10 cents to get into the theater, and five cents for the pop and five cents for the drinks. The bus driver owned the bus, and he would take people to the theater on Saturday nights. And, of course, he’d have a bus full. He would carry us to Central City for 10 cents to the theater. And we had a place down there below the theater where this man made these great big hamburgers in a great big skillet of grease. And he would put these great big hamburgers in this big skillet of grease, and put them all on these buns, onions and pickles and everything for a nickel and a nickel for a soft drink. And so that’s what we eat after we left the movie.”
A more rigorously edited book could have cut through the interviewees’ tendency toward this tiresome generalized recollection. It is this aspect of the book which caused me to reduce the rating. Though I��ve only saved the one example, this style of speech is prevalent to the point that I was becoming unhappy to be reading the book for how plodding it often was. Which is a shame because there are also a number of very, very powerful moments in the various interviews in which the strength of the format comes clear. For example, Charles Gratton (born 1932) recalls the sound of white children playing at a nearby elementary school while he was forced to walk six or seven miles to reach his segregated elementary school. “Even now, I can almost hear those kids, those white kids down at this elementary school playing, and the noise and laughing and playing, and I’m at home sick basically from the exposure of walking those six and seven miles to school every day. Whether it was raining or not, I had to go.”
Another powerful example comes from an interviewee named Willie Harrell, I believe. He begins by saying that when ROOTS came on television he had to turn it off because he had lived through the same things shown in that television movie even despite not being an out-and-out “slave” and it brought up terrible memories. His speech has elements of the rambling and repetition that characterizes so much of these interviews, but it remains poignant nevertheless: “Shit, you couldn’t even look at a white woman hard back then when I came up. You would get hung. Yeah. Sure would. Back then was just all slavery times. Fasten you up and whip you just like you a dog or mule, animal or something. Yeah, they would tie you up or hem you up in a barn or something . . . Might beat you to death. You couldn’t try to fight back then in them days. They would kill you. There wouldn’t be nothing did about it. Yeah. If they’d catch you trying to leave, they’d take you back there and whip you, fasten you up in the barn and whip you. It’s just like old slavery time. They hemmed me up in the barn like where they feed mules, and they whip me. It was two brothers. Two old white honkies. There wasn’t nothing I could do. They had a whip. Shit yeah, they whipped me. Sure. Wasn’t nothing you could do, but take it. You try to resist and they would kill you.”
The excerpt that I found the most poignant, though, was this from Ralph Thompson, talking about walking the long road to his segregated school while white children rode to school comfortably in a yellow school bus:
As heartbreaking as the above is, I’m not completely sure whether the interviews truly do give the reader the visceral being there feeling that one might hope the format would engender. Again, the people speaking are not necessarily writers or poets. I’m afraid that sometimes the harshness of conditions during segregation and outright white hostility doesn’t translate fully to the reader. A number of the interviewees do lament that the youth do not fully comprehend what life was like during that time. Anne Pointer says supposes “it sound funny to you because you never have bene subject to nothing like this, but that’s what I want to tell you: how horrible it is when everything you do, the [white] man’s got to approve it.” Another interviewee angrily confronts the type of people who would claim that blacks simply need to work harder to achieve what white families already have; he remembers children having to walk miles to school while whites lived pampered lives. “You talk about paying dues. What mother will take as a choice of putting her six-year-old son or daughter to walk a mile to school, across traffic spots and so forth, in the rain, in the snow, in the cold, etc., etc.? Not many. So anyone who would take the stand of, ‘Well, people have to work harder’, as someone said a few weeks ago, doesn’t know. You’ve given blood, sweat, and tears, the best of everything that you have had traditionally. Now, what more can you give? How much longer do you have to wait for your slice of the pie? It is not a gift. Your slice of the pie would not be a gift. It would be the same thing that all men get.” Kenneth Young shares the frustration toward those who suggest there was some easy way to avoid being mistreated in the workplace, for instance. “Of course, you might say: ‘Why didn’t you quit?’ Where, what am I going to do? Jump off the world? I can’t jump off the edge. Got to figure out a way to live in the system. Ig ot to try to find a way to make it better if I can.”
The editors also make it plain just how thoroughly white supremacy had been baked into American culture, especially in the south. “Jim Crow was not merely about the physical separation of blacks and whites. Nor was segregation strictly about laws, despite historians’ tendency to fix upon such legal landmarks as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In order to maintain dominance, whites needed more than the statutes and signs that specified ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ only; they had to assert and reiterate black inferiority with every word and gesture, in every aspect of both public and private life.”
Returning to Kenneth Young, he admits to wishing in his heart that the Black community had fought back more vehemently and “burn[ed] the whole damn South down.” He continues: “We were humiliated so many years and nothing we could do about it . . . They did everything they could to make you feel inferior. They didn’t miss a trick. If they had two fountains, they’d put up another cup up there for the blacks. Everything they could do to make you feel inferior they did it. And when it ended you can’t find a single white person who remembers it. [Laughter.] I swear you can’t. You can’t find a single one who remembers the days of segregation and those who talk about it, they’re so mad about it. Those white folks were so low down and dirty. I’m glad they’re dead.” (Throughout the book, the notation “[Laughter]” appears and it doesn’t take long to recognize that it usually accompanies especially strong grief or anger, an outlet for those feelings more socially acceptable than a gasping cry.) Staying with Young—“Somebody asked me one time: ‘K.B., do you think these southern white folks are going to hell for the way they treated you all?’ ‘No, they aren’t. They’re not. No.’ I said, ‘They can’t go to hell, it ain’t big enough to hold them.’ [Laughter.] ‘Some of them will get in, the rest of them won’t get in because hell will be too little.’”
So. You know, obviously I’ve been sharing a lot of direct quotes in this “review”—a LOT of them. There certainly are are lot of sobering statements. I do think the book conveys important information and I understand the reason that it offers the anecdotes straight from the lips of the victims. Sometimes the hurt that they convey cuts bone deep. Still, for the same reason, too much of the book is unfocused. It’s hard to fully recommend REMEMBERING JIM CROW because of how much that aspect diminishes it. I’d still say that ultimately there’s a lot here of real substance that makes it a good book on the whole, but with a more active hand editing and inserting contextualizing commentary I think it could have been a lot stronger.
Though I worried it would be another emotionally draining yet richly detailed book, I was nonetheless eager to read this title because I anticipated that it would be very good. It’s memories of what it was like to live through the Jim Crow era, from the perspective of Black Americans… and it’s told in their own voices! That is, the book is a collection of transcripts from interviews with people about their lived experiences during the period of de jure segregation. In an introduction, the premise is laid out plainly: “[L]ittle has been written about the actual experience of black Americans during the age of segregation . . . There was no larger sense of what occurred in the everyday lives of blacks from the 1890s through the onset of World War II. Instead of being understood as a time of complexity and struggle, the Jim Crow era appeared as a barren wasteland of oppression. It was almost as though the Stanley Elkins model of a ‘closed system’, with no outlets, that had once been applied to slavery, now had become the prism through which we understood the era of Jim crow. Oversimplified, static, and without nuance, the historiography of Jim Crow became a tale of total oppression, on the one hand, and passive submission, on the other.”
Certainly there was a pervasive, daily terror that Black Americans faced from cruel whites. The intro cites examples from later in the book: “[T]he man who told of his brother being killed in the middle of the night because he had not sufficiently deferred in the presence of a white man, another story of an African-American being dragged to his death behind a horse-drawn wagon or a pregnant wife having her womb slit, with both mother and child killed, because her husband allegedly had offended a white woman. From lynching to being denied the right to be called ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’, to having cars or school buses intentionally hit puddles of water to splash black people walking, there was neither escape from, nor redress for, the ubiquitous, arbitrary, and cruel reality of senseless white power.” However, despite this, the introduction argues that the real lesson the book imparts is not simply how extreme unchecked white cruelty had been, but instead “the extraordinary resilience of black citizens who, individually and collectively, found ways to endure, fight back, and occasionally define their own destinies” and the remarkable “capacity of the black community o come to each other’s aid and invent means of sustaining the collective will to survive and perhaps even inch forward.”
All of this seems so immediate and vital. Surely hearing first-hand accounts of the severity of the oppression experienced and how black people maintained their lives and their sanity under such conditions would be hugely powerful. This seemed to have all the makings of an incredible, very important book. Unfortunately, I was disappointed with it. In the final analysis, I’d give the book 3.5 stars except that Goodreads doesn’t allow for half-stars (at time of writing).
The thing is—yes, hearing directly from people who lived through this period of American history and were personally impacted by it is stirring, at times. But the problem with presenting unedited transcripts of interviews with elderly folks is that they are not especially illustrative, eloquent, or concise. Many of the interviewees tend to ramble and repeat themselves, veer from topic to topic without much organization, give too much focus to inconsequential minutiae, and describe events in broad, ambiguous terms. I only saved one example to show the sort of thing I’m talking about, but trust me that this is endemic to the whole: “We were able to go to the movies down here at Drakesboro when we lived at Browder. The blacks went upstairs and the white was downstairs. It was 10 cents to get in, I think. And you got a hamburger for five cents and a bottle of pop for five cents. So if you had about a quarter, it would do it all. Well, you had to have 50 cents, a quarter for the girl and a quarter for yourself. Oh, I can remember. Central City was the same price too. It was 10 cents to ride the bus, 10 cents to get into the theater, and five cents for the pop and five cents for the drinks. The bus driver owned the bus, and he would take people to the theater on Saturday nights. And, of course, he’d have a bus full. He would carry us to Central City for 10 cents to the theater. And we had a place down there below the theater where this man made these great big hamburgers in a great big skillet of grease. And he would put these great big hamburgers in this big skillet of grease, and put them all on these buns, onions and pickles and everything for a nickel and a nickel for a soft drink. And so that’s what we eat after we left the movie.”
A more rigorously edited book could have cut through the interviewees’ tendency toward this tiresome generalized recollection. It is this aspect of the book which caused me to reduce the rating. Though I��ve only saved the one example, this style of speech is prevalent to the point that I was becoming unhappy to be reading the book for how plodding it often was. Which is a shame because there are also a number of very, very powerful moments in the various interviews in which the strength of the format comes clear. For example, Charles Gratton (born 1932) recalls the sound of white children playing at a nearby elementary school while he was forced to walk six or seven miles to reach his segregated elementary school. “Even now, I can almost hear those kids, those white kids down at this elementary school playing, and the noise and laughing and playing, and I’m at home sick basically from the exposure of walking those six and seven miles to school every day. Whether it was raining or not, I had to go.”
Another powerful example comes from an interviewee named Willie Harrell, I believe. He begins by saying that when ROOTS came on television he had to turn it off because he had lived through the same things shown in that television movie even despite not being an out-and-out “slave” and it brought up terrible memories. His speech has elements of the rambling and repetition that characterizes so much of these interviews, but it remains poignant nevertheless: “Shit, you couldn’t even look at a white woman hard back then when I came up. You would get hung. Yeah. Sure would. Back then was just all slavery times. Fasten you up and whip you just like you a dog or mule, animal or something. Yeah, they would tie you up or hem you up in a barn or something . . . Might beat you to death. You couldn’t try to fight back then in them days. They would kill you. There wouldn’t be nothing did about it. Yeah. If they’d catch you trying to leave, they’d take you back there and whip you, fasten you up in the barn and whip you. It’s just like old slavery time. They hemmed me up in the barn like where they feed mules, and they whip me. It was two brothers. Two old white honkies. There wasn’t nothing I could do. They had a whip. Shit yeah, they whipped me. Sure. Wasn’t nothing you could do, but take it. You try to resist and they would kill you.”
The excerpt that I found the most poignant, though, was this from Ralph Thompson, talking about walking the long road to his segregated school while white children rode to school comfortably in a yellow school bus:
“When we would walk home in the evening down a gravel road and when the white bus would come, the driver would get up in the center, you know. The gravel would pile up in the center and the wheels would cut tracks in the road and it would pile it up. And he would get up in the center for those rocks to shoot out from under the wheels. And I can remember having to turn our backs in case a rock might come out and hit you in the eye. And if you were walking home from school and it rained and there’s a low spot and you happen to be coming by that low spot and you could hear the motor on the bus rev up because he’s going to speed up cause he’s going to hit that water as hard as he can. How can a person be so cold? And we would run, and we would turn our backs. And I’d say how can a person be so cold that would try to wet us down and try to put our eyes out and things like that? And those are some of the things that when you look back and you see how mean people could be to a kid. They didn’t know us. We didn’t bother them. And they would ride right by us and those kids was going to Millington at the time . . . and nobody tried to help us . . . But the things that stand out in my mind, that bus coming trying to, with the rocks and it rained, hit a water puddle. I’m talking about going out of his way to hit it. And we knew that, because we turn our backs. If we couldn’t get beyond, we get off the road as far as we could and we turn our backs. And that’s what it was like. That’s what it was like and you didn’t have nobody that you could turn to help you say, ‘Hey, bus driver, don’t do that.’ See? And going home telling your parents, you can imagine how frustrating that is. They did tell you to turn your head and the little things that they could tell you to do, but you couldn’t fight back because you didn’t have no way of fighting back.”
As heartbreaking as the above is, I’m not completely sure whether the interviews truly do give the reader the visceral being there feeling that one might hope the format would engender. Again, the people speaking are not necessarily writers or poets. I’m afraid that sometimes the harshness of conditions during segregation and outright white hostility doesn’t translate fully to the reader. A number of the interviewees do lament that the youth do not fully comprehend what life was like during that time. Anne Pointer says supposes “it sound funny to you because you never have bene subject to nothing like this, but that’s what I want to tell you: how horrible it is when everything you do, the [white] man’s got to approve it.” Another interviewee angrily confronts the type of people who would claim that blacks simply need to work harder to achieve what white families already have; he remembers children having to walk miles to school while whites lived pampered lives. “You talk about paying dues. What mother will take as a choice of putting her six-year-old son or daughter to walk a mile to school, across traffic spots and so forth, in the rain, in the snow, in the cold, etc., etc.? Not many. So anyone who would take the stand of, ‘Well, people have to work harder’, as someone said a few weeks ago, doesn’t know. You’ve given blood, sweat, and tears, the best of everything that you have had traditionally. Now, what more can you give? How much longer do you have to wait for your slice of the pie? It is not a gift. Your slice of the pie would not be a gift. It would be the same thing that all men get.” Kenneth Young shares the frustration toward those who suggest there was some easy way to avoid being mistreated in the workplace, for instance. “Of course, you might say: ‘Why didn’t you quit?’ Where, what am I going to do? Jump off the world? I can’t jump off the edge. Got to figure out a way to live in the system. Ig ot to try to find a way to make it better if I can.”
The editors also make it plain just how thoroughly white supremacy had been baked into American culture, especially in the south. “Jim Crow was not merely about the physical separation of blacks and whites. Nor was segregation strictly about laws, despite historians’ tendency to fix upon such legal landmarks as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In order to maintain dominance, whites needed more than the statutes and signs that specified ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’ only; they had to assert and reiterate black inferiority with every word and gesture, in every aspect of both public and private life.”
Returning to Kenneth Young, he admits to wishing in his heart that the Black community had fought back more vehemently and “burn[ed] the whole damn South down.” He continues: “We were humiliated so many years and nothing we could do about it . . . They did everything they could to make you feel inferior. They didn’t miss a trick. If they had two fountains, they’d put up another cup up there for the blacks. Everything they could do to make you feel inferior they did it. And when it ended you can’t find a single white person who remembers it. [Laughter.] I swear you can’t. You can’t find a single one who remembers the days of segregation and those who talk about it, they’re so mad about it. Those white folks were so low down and dirty. I’m glad they’re dead.” (Throughout the book, the notation “[Laughter]” appears and it doesn’t take long to recognize that it usually accompanies especially strong grief or anger, an outlet for those feelings more socially acceptable than a gasping cry.) Staying with Young—“Somebody asked me one time: ‘K.B., do you think these southern white folks are going to hell for the way they treated you all?’ ‘No, they aren’t. They’re not. No.’ I said, ‘They can’t go to hell, it ain’t big enough to hold them.’ [Laughter.] ‘Some of them will get in, the rest of them won’t get in because hell will be too little.’”
So. You know, obviously I’ve been sharing a lot of direct quotes in this “review”—a LOT of them. There certainly are are lot of sobering statements. I do think the book conveys important information and I understand the reason that it offers the anecdotes straight from the lips of the victims. Sometimes the hurt that they convey cuts bone deep. Still, for the same reason, too much of the book is unfocused. It’s hard to fully recommend REMEMBERING JIM CROW because of how much that aspect diminishes it. I’d still say that ultimately there’s a lot here of real substance that makes it a good book on the whole, but with a more active hand editing and inserting contextualizing commentary I think it could have been a lot stronger.
June 15, 2017
if you like first person accounts of jim crow america, and i do, then this is a good read. it reaffirms the stories your grandparents told you about growing up in early to mid 20th century and tells you some of the stories they didn't.
January 30, 2021
This is a must read. It is Hard read do to subvert
To the due
To the Subject matter. I don’t understand how human beings an treat each other these times.
To the due
To the Subject matter. I don’t understand how human beings an treat each other these times.
November 13, 2021
A+. First-hand accounts from victims of Jim Crow. Anyone who believes we're not a racist country should read this (but they won't).
August 3, 2018
I've always thought that for the United States as a country to progress, it would be beneficial to acknowledge past atrocities that has taken place on its soil in a greater historical context than it does. The era of Jim Crow was a time where citizens were given free range under the guise of laws and "customs" to deny their fellow U.S. citizens rights that were guaranteed to them by the U.S. Constitution all because they saw themselves as superior and felt entitled to act as such. Reading personal accounts of people living in such an oppressive and abusive state of governance as recently as 63 years ago gives me an appreciation of how young and blossoming our Constitutional Republic is, and if we truly want to project the notion of freedom and liberty onto the rest of the world, we must reflect on the accounts of the people in "Remembering Jim Crow" and aim to achieve it. The tyranny of a majority or a minority is not a democracy. The book could have been better if it was edited thoroughly.
May 11, 2020
This book was based on radio interviews of "survivors" of the Jim Crow discrimination that began after reconstruction and carried on until the civil-rights activists (with help from the government) finally swept it away. Well, mostly.
Our modern minds cannot even grasp the depravity of the discrimination that was supported by the law of the land. Everything was segregated ... schools, churches, work. Ostensibly, "separate but equal," but really not equal at all. Everything supplied by the government was preferential to whites, every job offered by employers was preferential to whites. How people survived through these trying times is a testament to their tenacity -- as one person put it, "we don't take any 'stuff' off white people.
I did have difficulty reading this book, the structure was clumsy and repetitive. However, the stories were real and disturbing.
Our modern minds cannot even grasp the depravity of the discrimination that was supported by the law of the land. Everything was segregated ... schools, churches, work. Ostensibly, "separate but equal," but really not equal at all. Everything supplied by the government was preferential to whites, every job offered by employers was preferential to whites. How people survived through these trying times is a testament to their tenacity -- as one person put it, "we don't take any 'stuff' off white people.
I did have difficulty reading this book, the structure was clumsy and repetitive. However, the stories were real and disturbing.
August 3, 2020
The stories told by the African Americans who lived in the Jim Crow south are heartbreaking. Maybe you've seen representations of this topic in fictional books or in the movies, but this book brings it to a very real and personal level. It's disturbing enough to read this bit of U.S. history; it's more disturbing to hear white voices, roughly around the year 2000 (in the Appendix, the Radio Documentary Transcript) - those who lived through the Jim Crow south and felt that the black population knew their place and were happy with it, and Southerners who have lived only after the Civil Rights movement and feel that African Americans should "get over it".
My three stars are driven mostly by those portions of the book I found to be slow and, perhaps, not the best choice of stories to include. But, that doesn't detract from the value of the book overall.
My three stars are driven mostly by those portions of the book I found to be slow and, perhaps, not the best choice of stories to include. But, that doesn't detract from the value of the book overall.
August 20, 2023
"Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk about Life in the Segregated South" is a profoundly enlightening and empathetic exploration of an important yet often painful chapter in American history. Through the skillful compilation of personal narratives and interviews, Chafe, Gavins, and Korstad provide an invaluable platform for voices that were silenced for far too long. Their meticulous work not only sheds light on the harsh realities of segregation but also celebrates the resilience, strength, and triumph of African Americans during a challenging era. A compelling and essential read that fosters understanding and promotes a more inclusive society.
January 12, 2021
I read only part of this, but I think I got a good sense for it. I had read every word of several Studs Terkel oral histories, but this didn't captivate me in the same way. It is at the same time overly annotated and under-edited. The intro to some of the stories are explained so much that they don't need to be read, and others go on and on. There are some of the expected stories of horrific violence, but that is expected. More often, I got the sense of constant pressure, dread and a thousand slights.
May 9, 2025
3.75*
The intros of the chapters made the personal accounts seem repetitive, not sure why they did that. I think some of them couldve been edited as the people interviewed repeated themselves a lot or it just went on and on.
Good book overall but nothing groundbreaking in here. If this is your introduction to racist accounts then it might be a bit educational but otherwise there was nothing new in here that a basic school education wouldn't give you. so that was a little disappointing
The intros of the chapters made the personal accounts seem repetitive, not sure why they did that. I think some of them couldve been edited as the people interviewed repeated themselves a lot or it just went on and on.
Good book overall but nothing groundbreaking in here. If this is your introduction to racist accounts then it might be a bit educational but otherwise there was nothing new in here that a basic school education wouldn't give you. so that was a little disappointing
November 14, 2021
Oral history of life in the segregated south. I read this in pieces over the course of several months. AS someone who grew up in a small town in northeast Iowa - I had no idea about the restrictions placed on the lives of African Americans. Important to read, learn and understand the stories told in this book.
November 23, 2021
This book was very thought provoking and disturbing throughout, as I read personal accounts of life as a black person during this dark time in history. The end got a little long and repetitive, but I found myself shocked, saddened, and thoroughly disappointed in my own race, with every turn of the page. Important to read these stories.
November 29, 2020
Interviews telling about life memories of Jim Crow era.
I enjoyed the personal accounts of real life happenings and mistreatment. I learned about the pervasive situation of very different outcomes and inequality just because of poverty and race.
I enjoyed the personal accounts of real life happenings and mistreatment. I learned about the pervasive situation of very different outcomes and inequality just because of poverty and race.
February 17, 2021
The United States: O, the shame!
September 2, 2021
An informative and detailed oral history.
November 25, 2021
Not enough editing, repetitive. The CDs at the back of the book were better edited. Met some interesting people, learned some things, but had to weed through the book to find them.
January 15, 2023
Very insightful! Anyone who wants to learn more about civil rights issues or Jim Crow should read. It brings story to the history of black people.
October 17, 2023
Interesting, depressing.
Was a bit dry, but expected.
Was a bit dry, but expected.
November 17, 2024
This book was good. The stories presented in this book about the he'll blacks folks went through to survive is sad but true. Read your black history.
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