Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920–1945 by Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920–1945 by Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy Traci Parker Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920–1945. By Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. [xii], 280. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4672-5; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4671-8.) Embracing the long civil rights movement approach, the historian Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy tells the story of African American women’s civil rights activism in early-twentieth-century Washington, D.C., which she aptly refers to as “Jim Crow Capital,” in Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920–1945. Murphy argues that, after World War I and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, African American women waged a gamut of campaigns for voting and citizenship rights. These rights, which were conferred by local and federal laws in the 1860s, were abolished less than a decade later. Working in behalf of all African Americans, in and outside the nation’s capital, black women “crafted a broad vision of citizenship rights, maintaining that full equality would never be achieved until everyone was equal in the eyes of the law; each person had the opportunity to earn a just wage and live decently; America’s commemorative landscape celebrated the achievements of the nation’s diverse citizenry; and all women, men, and children lived free of the terrors of violence” (p. 2). African American women’s vision and activism, Murphy concludes, not only transformed the nation’s capital but also influenced the nature and direction of postwar black freedom struggles. Drawing largely on black organizational records and newspapers, Murphy meticulously traces in six chapters African American women’s shifting focus from national politics to local affairs. Each chapter examines these women’s use of social and political networks and organizations to try to pass (albeit unsuccessfully) a federal antilynching law, combat police brutality, secure economic justice and local suffrage, and end racial segregation and discrimination in public accommodations. The chapter on African American women’s campaign against police brutality is particularly timely and compelling. Using twenty-nine reported cases of violence against black women, Murphy reveals that, though the campaign was “not an exclusively women’s movement,” women successfully leveraged their “networks in neighborhood associations, the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA, fraternal orders, and political organizations. to make the city ‘Safe for Negro Womanhood’” (p. 79). As black women rallied against police violence, Murphy also notes, they began “to employ militant language, direct action resistance, and an unwavering quest for first-class citizenship” (p. 109). Arguably, Murphy makes her strongest case that black women in Washington laid the foundation for the civil rights movement in her final chapter. Here, she examines Howard University students’ 1943 sit-in movement and situates it within “a larger movement that included federal lobbying campaigns, protests against transportation segregation, and ongoing engagement with the memories of the Civil War” (p. 174). This sit-in movement, Murphy finds, “became affiliated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) By uniting a local movement with a prominent, national civil rights organization, activists saw the black freedom struggle in Washington, D.C., as a model for the nation” (p. 190). [End Page 512] Some readers, however, may be left wanting a fuller interrogation of this local movement’s reach. What made the Washington sit-in movement “a model for the nation”? Was it the employment of this tactic in the consumer sphere and in the nation’s capital during World War II? Was it the convergence of the sit-in with other grassroots campaigns in Washington? Was it well received by African Americans in other cities—who were engaging similar battles—during and after the war? Nevertheless, Jim Crow Capital is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature on the black freedom movement and black Washington’s lives and labors in the early twentieth century. Murphy’s well-researched book reaffirms and expands our knowledge of the sacrifices, ingenuity, and activism of African American women who paved the way and shaped...