When one tells the history of the mid-twentieth-century South, it ought not simply be a story of the struggle for civil rights and its backlash. It is also a hemispheric economic history. And to the extent that the unfinished history of the movement includes persistent economic inequality that depended on the repression of labor movements, political domination, and extralegal violence, that is a history that sits within the region writ broadly. New Orleans is a crossroads.
