The Strange Career of Jim Crow

"Now we’re going from these very recent books by Piketty and Alexander to historical books , because I’m an economic historian. I like these. C. Vann Woodward wrote a book that has become a classic, about the origin of this system that we have in the United States. It’s not the Civil War, not slavery, it’s taken way back in my book to understand where it’s coming from. But then, after the Civil War and then after Reconstruction, white Southerners recreated a system of laws and social repression called Jim Crow laws. C. Vann Woodward wrote what is still the most compelling account of that, in the late 19th century. That’s the framework that still survives today in many ways. And, of course, that’s the reference in Michelle Alexander’s book, which she’s taking off C. Vann Woodward, just as Piketty was taking off Marx. These books all fit together into a picture of rather sad race relations in the United States. Sad and very durable. The name is rather mysterious but I think it comes from a minstrel character. It’s not an actual person. But it’s quite common now to represent racist repression. I have that example in my book, partly because I live in Massachusetts. It’s really very upsetting and a little surprising. It’s almost as if people in the FTE sector—the upper sector of the economy—have forgotten about mass incarceration. This is a major social experiment, characterised that way by criminologists, and it has just vanished from sight. That’s true in Massachusetts, which is a great academic centre. There are people who study it and I read their books. But in public discussion, it’s almost invisible. In the presidential campaign that we just went through, it wasn’t even mentioned—by either candidate. “One might say that what has replaced Marx and his thought about industry dominating the economy is finance” I’ve just written a paper —with the aid of Robert Solow, a 92-year-old Nobel laureate in economics—about how we’ve gotten to a new equilibrium of mass incarceration. Unless something is done to shock the system, we’ll just carry on with this kind of mass incarceration and destruction of urban communities. We’ll see the effects, but we won’t be going back to the causes of it. That people become conscious of it, that they read these books and understand it. Also, that politicians get more concerned with what’s going on. There might be some event at a prison. It’s very difficult to know—once it gets put on the backburner—how to get it back up into our consciousness. One possible way is if we have a recession—which we may well have, inevitably, in the next some years—and then states may be looking at how to save money. When they discover that they are spending large amounts of money keeping prisoners in state prisons, they might say, ‘We really have too many people here. We’ve put them in for long sentences, they’re all growing old, and we’re supporting them. We can’t afford it anymore.’ That might be a push. But the push has to come to change the law. There was a bill in 2010 to reform sentencing procedures. That made a start. You could have more laws like that, that would try and get us out of this bad equilibrium back into a better equilibrium."

"This is probably the most influential book ever written in Southern history. It began as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia in the 1950s, during the time of segregation. The defenders of segregation in the 1950s talked about it as an inevitable byproduct of two races living together. Woodward said, ‘no, segregation was created only 50 years ago.’ Segregation was not inevitable; it was invented recently and so segregation can be destroyed. The Promise of the New South was written in conversation with Woodward’ s Origins of the New South , published in 1951. Woodward had told the story of how the early 20th-century South came under the control of demagogic white politicians. I took the very last class Woodward ever taught. When I read this book, my knees grew weak. It was history that read like literature. The Promise of the New South takes a broader look at the same period. I often ask people, ‘Name something that happened in the American South between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Civil Rights Movement’, and they’ll just draw a blank. I’ll say, ‘Well, nothing happened except the invention of the most widely recognized brand name in the world, Coca-Cola, the emergence of the most rapidly spreading religious denominations in the world, Pentecostalism, and the invention of America’s only truly original cultural contributions to the world: blues, jazz and country music. “You have the paradox of Christianity being both the explanation for why slavery is just, and a great resource for people in slavery” The Promise of the New South was trying to evoke that world. To get down to the ground, I traveled 12,000 miles in a $400 car, staying in motels. I went to every archive I could find and said, ‘I want to see everything you have from 1890 to 1910.’ They’d say, ‘this schoolgirl’s diary?’ I’d say, ‘Oh yeah.’ They’d say, ‘this sharecropper’s account book?’ And I’d say, ‘Gosh, yeah.’ I went through all of these records from folks no one ever heard of to evoke a South that had gotten left out of history books, to include the half of the population that was female and to show that African Americans were not only people to whom things were done, but also people who were creating their own lives and culture. It aims to be a tapestry of life in the South during that period. The leading historians of the South, in prior generations, worked outside of the South. During their time, the South was a segregated South. After generations of struggle, the South is different. I’m a native Southerner. I grew up in East Tennessee. Appalachia is an unusual background for an academic. I chose Southern history because I thought it was clear that slavery was the great American sin and that we’re not going to be able to move forward until we address that directly. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . One reason that I was interested in going to Richmond is because I knew there was important work to be done there. I’ve been an expert witness for Virginia as they considered the removal of the (Confederate commander General Robert E.) Lee monument. If you want your work to matter, be careful what you wish for. As we’re learning now, it turns out the causes of the Civil War and where the cult of the ‘lost cause’ comes from matters a lot. Like all people, we interpret the past from where we are today. We’ve come to see that the structures of injustice and the practice of injustice extended across the United States. But if we don’t understand the wellspring of that injustice, we’re not going to be able to address it. And the wellspring of racial injustice lies in the creation of a system of perpetual bondage in the South. Almost all Black people in the United States came through the crucible of slavery in the South. So, to understand the America of today, you must understand the South of the past."