Remembering Jim Crow : African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South

A timely paperback reissue of the stunning, prize-winning portrait of the Jim Crow South through unique first-person accounts

Praised as “viscerally powerful” (Publishers Weekly), this remarkable work of oral history captures the searing experience of the Jim Crow years through first-person interviews carefully collected by researchers at Duke University’s Behind the Veil project. Newly relevant today as Americans reckon with the legacies of slavery and strive for racial equality, Remembering Jim Crow provides vivid, compelling accounts by men and women from all walks of life, who tell how their day-to-day lives were subjected to profound and unrelenting racial oppression.

“A shivering dose of reality and inspiring stories of everyday resistance” (Library Journal), Remembering Jim Crow is a testament to how Black Southerners fought back against the system, raising children, building churches and schools, running businesses, and struggling for respect in a society that denied them the most basic rights. Collectively, these narratives illuminate individual and community survival and tell a powerful story of the American past that is crucial for us to remember as we grapple with Jim Crow’s legacies in the present.

William H. Chafe is Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History emeritus at Duke University. He is the author of numerous books and a co-editor, with Raymond Gavins and Robert Korstad, of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South (The New Press).

Raymond Gavins is a professor of history at Duke University and the project director of “Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South,” an oral history project undertaken by Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a co-editor, with William H. Chafe and Robert Korstad, of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South (The New Press) and the author of The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership.

Robert Korstad is the Kevin D. Gorter Professor of Public Policy and History at Duke University. He received his BA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include twentieth-century U.S. history, labor history, African American history, and contemporary social policy, and he is the co-director of a major documentary research project at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, “Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South.” Korstad is a co-editor, with William H. Chafe and Raymond Gavins, of Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South (The New Press).