South of Freedom

Originally published in 1952 and long out of print, South of Freedom is a first-rate account of what it was like to live as a second-class citizen, to experience the segregation, humiliation, danger, stereotypes, economic exploitation, and taboos that were all part of life for African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s. For this edition, Douglas Brinkley provides a new introduction, incorporating recent interviews with Rowan to place the work in the context of its time. An engaging, disturbing look at the opinions of the time on the "Negro problem," Rowan's tales of travel in the South under Jim Crow are especially valuable today as a means of seeing how far we have advanced--and fallen short--in forty-five years.