Outside the Lines: Civil Rights as a Way of Life

Abstract

In much of the literature on Jim Crow America, historians have themselves been segregationists. They haven't advocated racial separatism as an ideal, of course, but they have relied upon analytical approaches that divide their subjects into categories nearly as artificial and arbitrary as the discriminatory structures of segregation. The black struggle for equality, in its broadest strokes, has been portrayed as a steady rise from the depths of the late nineteenth century to the creation of a modern civil rights movement midway through the twentieth. And along the way, this narrative continues, African Americans moved from one set of circumstances to their opposite number-from the oppression of the rural south to the opportunities of the urban north, from old allegiances to the Republicans to new allegiances to the Democrats, and, more generally, from second-class citizenship to full-fledged equality. Along that broad arc, scholars have divided African Americans into competing camps at every turn. In the realm of education, blacks either supported Booker T. Washington's call for industrial schools to uplift the masses or else backed W. E. B. Du Bois's focus on the talented tenth. In resisting the racial status quo, they either fought for equal rights and complete integration, following the lead of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), or else advocated racial separatism and emigration, taking their cues from Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). On and on, the historiography of the Jim Crow era has relied on such dichotomies to split African Americans into fractious camps, etching ever more dividing lines on a landscape already crisscrossed by the color line. Thankfully, in this excellent study of black Los Angeles, Douglas Flamming moves beyond these somewhat tired tropes and offers a more nuanced account of Jim Crow America. With a rich array of sources and a keen eye for detail, he has crafted an engaging narrative that skillfully recounts the complex experiences of African Americans in the City of Angels between the late