Leon F. Litwack constructs an account of life in the Jim Crow South. Drawing on an array of contemporary documents and first-person narratives from both blacks and whites, he examines how black men and women learned to live with the severe restrictions imposed on their lives during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Litwack relates how black schools and colleges struggled to fulfill the expectations placed on them in a climate that was separate but hardly equal; how hardworking tenant farmers were cheated of their earnings, turned off their land, or refused acreage they could afford to purchase; how successful and ambitious blacks often became targets of white violence and harassment.

Faced with evidence of black independence and assertiveness, the white South responded with a policy of oppression and subjugation that systematically "disrecognized" black people. Litwack shows how blacks not only coped with crushing poverty and misery, but also found refuge in their own institutions and managed to preserve their humanity and dignity through religion, work, music, and (frequently subversive) humor.