Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was

"A tongue-in-cheek travel guide to the United States as Stetson Kennedy saw it in the 1950s when segregation was still firmly in place and when there were many barriers in housing, education, and job opportunities for blacks, Native Americans, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, and almost anyone who was not a white Protestant. . . . The Guide was [first] published in Paris in 1956 by Jean-Paul Sartre because the author could find no American publisher who was willing to issue the book. In this new edition, Kennedy has added an afterword that provides his impressions of contemporary ‘desegregated racism’."—Florida Historical Quarterly

Jim Crow Guide documents  the system of legally imposed American apartheid that prevailed during what Stetson Kennedy calls "the long century from Emancipation to the Overcoming." The mock guidebook covers every area of activity where the tentacles of Jim Crow reached. From the texts of state statutes, municipal ordinances, federal regulations, and judicial rulings, Kennedy exhumes the legalistic skeleton of Jim Crow in a work of permanent value for scholars and of exceptional appeal for general readers.