How the South Rose Again

STONY THE ROAD: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow

BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

Penguin Press, 320 pp., $30

IN (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” The forces that pushed the freedmen back and how the black community responded are the subjects of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s its title taken from James Weldon Johnson’s 1900 poem “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” Gates, a distinguished scholar, filmmaker, and critic, writes with clarity and force about