Coming of Age in Jim Crow D.C.: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life. By Paula C. Austin (New York, New York University Press, 2019) 195 pp. $89.00 cloth $26.00 paper $15.12 e-book

Abstract

In Coming of Age in Jim Crow D.C., Austin critically investigates the subjectivities of African-American children in interwar Washington, D.C. Austin’s monograph is less a comprehensive history of black Washington in the 1920s and 1930s than a critical analysis of the everyday lives of children and the burdens of archival absence. Since the historiography of black Washington has deepened considerably in the past ten years, Austin’s work opens new avenues for exploring the complex lives of African Americans in the nation’s capital.Austin was deliberate in selecting her subject material. Eschewing a focus on grand narratives of racial progress or civil-rights victories, she instead chose to explore the lives of working-class black children who lived in southwest Washington and would have been lost entirely to history, if not for Howard University and its cadre of black social scientists, who used the nation’s capital as a laboratory to investigate their subject matter. Two sociologists—William H. Jones and E. Franklin Frazier—conducted extensive research on black Washington, particularly housing, labor, families, and childhood development. Austin critically reads these interviews against the grain, viewing them as an opportunity to explore, not pathologize, the inner lives of black children. Austin explicitly states that she is interested in her subjects not only as historical actors but also as critical thinkers. She contextualizes these interviews within the city’s segregated landscape, mining them for information that illuminates boys’ and girls’ interior lives, terming these sources her “interdisciplinary archive.” Austin supplements these interviews by drawing on black newspapers, census records, and the published work of black social scientists. Although trained as a historian, Austin embraces interdisciplinarity, pairing her historical analysis with insights from anthropology, literary theory, urban planning, and gender studies.Methodologically, she offers historians an excellent roadmap for the elusive quest to illuminate the everyday lives of black children in the nation’s capital. She consults her sources for information about the performative aspects of an interview process and considers how children’s responses reveal insights into their self-knowledge. After she explains the structure of her “interdisciplinary archive” in Chapter 1, she turns toward race, space, and place, offering a fascinating exploration of subjectivities in political activism and children’s gender and sexual development.Some of the interviews in Coming of Age in Jim Crow D.C. are jewels. Austin analyzes fourteen-year old Susie Morgan, who defied the white police to swim in the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial, explaining that “Abraham Lincoln” had given her permission. Since its dedication, the Lincoln Memorial had a charged history in the nation’s capital. Morgan’s playful relationship with this building reveals fresh insights into children’s experiences with segregated landscapes. In other interviews, children discussed their heroes, evinced complicated and nuanced opinions about the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” movement, and questioned their desire for marriage. All of these interviews demonstrate how working-class black children balanced the short-term and long-term impacts of political activism with an awareness about the struggles of everyday survival and how they questioned discourses of respectability.Because Austin organizes her book thematically, not chronologically, she loses a the sense of history to some extent. The interwar period in Washington, D.C. was in constant flux, but Austin tends to flatten some of the key events. Moreover, she might have developed her discussion of the historiographical literature in the nation’s capital more fully. Although she consciously avoids a celebration of agency—a central trope in social history—she sometimes treats racial segregation in D.C. as uncontested, when in reality, thousands of black residents in the nation’s capital, including children, were actively protesting Jim Crow. Despite these critiques, one of the most pressing concerns in African-American history is to investigate the subtleties of everyday life. Austin’s book is a welcome addition to this issue; her methodological insights will be of great value to scholars of the African-American experience.