Long after the emancipation of slavery in the United States, African Americans still faced economic struggles that forced them to do everything they could to assert themselves in society. In the novel “Not Slave Not Free” author Jay R. Mandle expresses these struggles and explains the migration of African Americans from cities to a very rural South. The focal point of this story is the early Southern society before World War II. Mandle explains the role of African Americans in this society and the huge effect they had on society. Mandle was also a very skilled writer regarding the economic circumstances of the South during post-emancipation America. He has written several novels dealing with income inequality in America, as well as being an economic specialist. Mandle is also the W. Bradford Wiley Professor of Economics at Colgate University. All these qualities that Mandle possesses make him a competent writer when it comes to economic situations in the South. This book is also the second edition and was republished in 1994. The publisher of the novel was the University of Pittsburg Press and the story was also changed in the first chapter. So now let's examine the levels of rising poverty in the South that Mandle carefully described in the book. The first part of the South that Mandle analyzed was the economic situation of the South before World War II. Mandle hypothesizes that the South was the least developed area in the entire United States. He also believed that the fact that it was so underdeveloped was a key aspect that explained the poverty of African Americans in the pre-war years. Since the South was not advanced, it did not offer African Americans the opportunity to work and... mid-paper... Americans were migrating from the South, there were fewer hands to work in areas of the South. This issue was also a key factor in the economic decline of South America during the post-World War II period. This book was quite interesting to me and opened my eyes to a different view of the United States during times of trouble. It made me realize that everyone was having trouble sustaining life as well as sustaining an economy. I never realized the enormous impact African Americans had on the Southern economy, but now I understand that they are one of the reasons it took the United States so long to get back on its feet. I thought Mandle did a great job of keeping the read interesting and had abundant knowledge of the topic. I enjoyed reading this book and it greatly increased my knowledge of the pre-WWII South.