Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life

Abstract

This book provides an important addition to the African American saga by offering an oral history of Black youth in segregated Washington, DC. The coverage is for the interwar years.Through skillful use of previous interviews and community studies, the author reveals what poor and working-class Blacks in their formative years were thinking, doing, and feeling. It's a revealing story that clearly notes the variety of sensibilities in a population that from the outside seemed homogenous.Paula C. Austin essentially revisits the work of Black sociologists who studied the nation's capital through extensive interviews within the Black community. She fills in aspects of Black life that earlier researchers missed or misinterpreted. For example, an interview with Susie Morgan reveals the relationship of poor teens with the police and the use of forbidden spaces allowable to whites. How these children dealt with the use of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and the Southwest Settlement House tells the reader much about their spatial relationship to Jim Crow DC and their efforts to live with what was available. The need for recreational space resulted in a defiance that, as Susie Morgan said about the Pool, “Course we know we ain't got no business there, but that's why we go in” (p. 79).Expanding on the earlier studies, Austin also delves into attitudes of these poor and working-class youth toward class, sexual relations, political activity, and general engagement with their plight in a segregated city. Rather than apathy, acceptance of their subordinate place, and an absence of community connection, the author writes of residents engaged, aware, politically active, and desiring change in their neighborhood and in their future.The author also provides important insight into these adolescents’ sense of racial identity, gender, and, as with James Albert Gray, their leadership skills. Approved or unapproved outside activities are also examined in relation to clubs and gangs. Within this discussion, Austin offers a trenchant analysis of a burgeoning sense of masculinity. Nathaniel Smith's interview is informative in this sense in regard to his membership in the Society Gents Club and his views of what it meant to be a man.Likewise, the discussion of Black girls and women indicates their role in gangs, attitudes toward femininity, the future, marriage, and violence. Austin's use of interviews with the same person over several chapters and issues provides effective transitions and deeper probing. This is the case with Susie Morgan, whose views and stories, along with others such as Myron Ross, Jr., fill the chapters and shape the book's analysis.With both girls and boys, their inner thoughts show a more nuanced process than earlier studies reveal. Interviewers did not always present their questions in a way to elicit honest answers or ignored some of the information they received. And here Austin brings the reader into fresh territory. More is learned about these individuals than in the initial interviewer's interpretations. The rereading and reassessment of 1930s oral histories can provide clues to present behaviors among the adolescent Black poor and working class. The study also makes a good case for condemning past or present-day racial profiling and, as the author states, recognizing the humanity of a maligned and misunderstood group. To outsiders, and even to some of the interviewers, these neighborhoods and youths appeared to be degraded and hopeless elements within the city's poorest areas. Yet a hopefulness existed among the Black adolescents studied and re-analyzed that is a useful aid to present-day community workers and future scholars.