The Second Nadir: Yes, This Is Jim Crow.
The states that are using the Louisana v. Callais decision to increase white power are not taking us back to Jim Crow. We are already there.
What do you do after you change the world?
In 1954, 13 years after he co-authored the executive order that changed America’s demographic landscape, created a Black middle class and helped America defeat the most powerful fascist on the planet, historian, professor and policymaker Rayford Logan released The Negro in American Life and Thought.
Logan’s seminal text covered the years between 1877 and 1902, when America dedicated itself to “the deliberate relegation of Negroes to the role of an inferior class.” Although the groundbreaking work is often republished as The Betrayal of the Negro, the book’s original subtitle coined a term that would come to define the era when anti-Blackness reached its rock bottom:
The “nadir.”
“The last decade of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth century marked the nadir of the Negro’s status in American society,” Logan wrote. “At the turn of the century, it seemed, indeed, that they might become a caste.” Today, Logan’s term is so ubiquitous that it has its own Wikipedia page. Subsequent scholars would extend the “nadir” to include the Red Summer of 1919, the post-World War I lynching epidemic and everything up to Franklin Roosevelt asking a Black man to help him save the world. However, no one ever disagrees with Logan’s start date.
But why 1877?
No, white people didn’t hold a national whites-only Zoom call announcing the opening day for racism. There was no anti-Black group chat (Trust me, Pete Hegseth would have exposed it). And while 1877 marked the official end of Reconstruction and the beginning of Jim Crow, the event that sparked a half-century of terrorism, disenfranchisement and racial apartheid can be traced to one American phenomenon:
The gerrymander.
