Volume 36, Number 11 · June 29, 1989
The Mississippi Horrors
By C. Vann Woodward
Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow
by Neil R. McMillen
University of Illinois Press, 430 pp., $27.50
The plight of southern black people in the age of Jim Crow has of late had little attention from historians and the changes since then have often been minimized. At least three reasons come to mind that help explain why this is so. One is the urgent need for changes of a new type—particularly economic change—demanded by the situation of a black metropolitan underclass. A second reason is the heritage of frustration left by black nationalists, whose aspirations for separate black institutions were not addressed by the civil rights movement. And a third is the twilight zone that always exists between living memory and written history, a shadowy world in which, for most people, the history of black repression under Jim Crow laws and practices still lies. The light cast by living memory dims as the numbers possessing it decline, while full illumination by history has been slow in coming and even slower in being comprehended.
Review, 3862 words
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