Far from a recollection of anecdotal injustices, the book goes beyond recounting "the bad old days when bigots and bigotry reigned" by examining the ways in which Jim Crow created a "coherent social order" for those who experienced it—one not as easily reduced to segregated lunch counters and designated waiting rooms at the bus station. Busting a few myths about what the system was and what it wasn't, you describe how even as segregated black communities "were excluded from political and civic life," Jim Crow was not designed to exclude them from economic life. "The point was not to remove them from the mainstream economy," you write, "but to enforce their subordinate position within it." Was "the point" of Jim Crow to keep black Americans separate and relegated, or was it to keep them poor?
Another interesting question. I'd say the answer is both, and more still. And that's partly what's wrong with how people are inclined at this point to think about that period, as well as what's wrong with how people are, and have been inclined to think about remedies. Like all social orders or governing regimes that succeed—and 60 years or more qualifies as success—the Jim Crow order was improvised. Its main precipitant was the threat to southern ruling class hegemony asserted by the Populist insurgency at the end of the 19th century. Racial scapegoating did what racial scapegoating does; it's why "race" exists as a socially meaningful category in the first place. The Jim Crow order imposed white supremacy and apartheid, and most of all racial disfranchisement at the state level by constitutional action. The "point" certainly was to turn black people into a population without citizenship rights, which made them all vulnerable to labor discipline without recourse and therefore to keep them poor. Also, disfranchisement eliminated the closest potential electoral ally for white popular classes—workers and farmers—and thereby reshuffled the patterns of alliance available to them and altered the potential stakes of class politics.
So how big a dent did the civil rights victories of the 1960s put in that hegemonic power of the ruling class? Were opportunities missed to further upend the economic order in the more immediate wake of Jim Crow’s collapse?