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The legacy of Jim Crow, that epoch of social order that defined race relations in the American South for two-thirds of the twentieth century, takes on new meaning when you begin to integrate the human-historical events ofthat period in extra-regional terms. Indeed that era of codified racial supremacy in the American South tied the region in many important ways to the theory and global practice of colonial imperialism. By treating the rise of Jim Crow as an integral piece of a global puzzle that made up the Age of High Imperialism, and by association treating the Civil Rights Movement that later secured its demise as an integral piece of the Age of Decolonization, such a move threads the historical experience of the United States more intimately (and more accurately) to that of global history. The traditional reliance within United States historiography on the usage of such rhetorical terms as "Jim Crow" and the "Civil Rights Movement" in isolation has had in effect the euphemistic value of detaching the American experience (and public memory) from global processes that truly enveloped the modern world and transcended national frontiers in the heyday of the European World Order, of which the United States was a most crucial byproduct. At the same time, treating the Era of Reconstruction after the Civil War - having gone much further than simply Emancipation - as an important American counterpoint to the Age of High Imperialism, even as a precursor to the Age of Decolonization, also serves to thread the historical narrative of the United States more fully into Global history. For the Age of High Imperialism and the Age of Decolonization were, in fact, central to the development of the modern world condition, and a nation, no less than the United States, can make conflicting and competing contributions to those two processes.
The detachment of the American public from the South 's Jim Crow past still complicates domestic race relations today, let alone the public's perceptions of the legacy of racism in the developing world. Few events in this decade better illustrated this domestic amnesia than the 100th birthday celebration of Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Then approaching the end of his record-length tenure of forty eight years, the wheelchair-bound senator celebrated...