From The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives, which will be published this month by Verso.

The everyday life of the segregation era is not much discussed outside academia. More attention is given to large events—court decisions, laws, protests—and to the heroism of the movement, the horror of extraordinary racist militants, lynchings, bombings, and the murders of civil-rights activists. Missing from these discussions is a sense of how the segregationist regime was held together, what practical purposes it served. It is identified with abstractions like prejudice, bigotry, racism, and an eternal white supremacy—which tell us nothing about how the…