Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877–1932 by Mark A. Johnson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877–1932 by Mark A. Johnson H. Paul Thompson Jr. (bio) Rough Tactics: Black Performance in Political Spectacles, 1877–1932. By Mark A. Johnson. ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. 235. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $30.00.) In Rough Tactics, Mark A. Johnson brilliantly and painstakingly uncovers and interprets the nonintuitive intersections of popular music, popular politics, and Black-white relations during the rise and height of the Jim Crow South. His argument focuses on political spectacles—such events as conventions, political rallies, and parades for various causes—and the presence and function of Black musicians at these events. Johnson's time frame covers both pre- and postdisfranchisement, but his argument is that, regardless of African Americans' voting rights, they were active participants in political spaces in ways that we might not expect. African Americans' behavior in those spaces, while at times genuinely supportive of the white agenda, often was meant to challenge or undermine the racism of that space through what is called "rough music." The story weaves through a multitude of state and local political campaigns and takes a deep dive into the southern prohibition movement, the 1903 United Confederate Veterans (UCV) reunion in New Orleans, and the 1909 Memphis mayoral election. Johnson's narrative is contextualized within the national campaign against political spectacles in general and the rise of Jim Crow. The first chapter focuses on African American bands in political spectacles through 1899, which Johnson uses as the approximate beginning of Black voter disfranchisement. Black bands were such a draw that both [End Page 139] Republicans and Democrats frequently employed them, whether for local contests or for functions, such as the celebration of the nomination of James Garfield. They were also found in local prohibition campaigns, labor movement events, and Virginia's Readjuster movement, usually to attract Black support to their cause. Chapter 2 reviews the role of musicians in Atlanta's local-option prohibition campaigns of 1885 and 1887 and Macon's in 1898. The "bridge" chapter focuses on the failed effort of New Orleans's American Federation of Musicians to require the UCV to include Black bands in its 1903 reunion. This dispute highlighted changing southern race relations, because, Johnson points out, the UCV had employed Black bands for earlier reunions and Black bands even participated in Lost Cause celebrations, such as the dedication of Richmond's Robert E. Lee statue. By 1903, however, southern racism was shifting to an exclusionary approach, as the argument of the UCV reunion committee that Black bands had no place in a "strictly social" event trumped the past practices of their own organization. As Johnson explains, "Although white southerners romanticized the enslaved Black musician, who made music willingly for the master, they balked at the new generation of professional talent, who insisted on setting terms of employment and compensation" (126). The next chapter examines Black band participation in southern prohibition contests in the early 1900s, when the prohibition movement had shifted from courting Black voters to advocating for their disfranchisement. Despite being disfranchised, like women, Black men were active participants in these contests, and, on some occasions, Black anti-prohibition bands amazingly confronted white female prohibitionists publicly without negative repercussions. Johnson's book climaxes with a look at the 1909 Memphis mayoral campaign, in which Black band leader W. C. Handy created the hit song "Mister Crump" as part of the get-out-the-vote effort for victorious candidate E. H. Crump, who went on to become Memphis's political boss until the 1940s. That song also launched Handy to the zenith of his career. Rough Tactics is based on extensive and intensive reading of ninety-two newspapers from this era, Handy's autobiography, and a few manuscript collections. The concise yet detailed and nuanced overview of several local prohibition campaigns is clearly one of the strengths of this work. But the most notable achievement of Rough Tactics is how it expands and complicates our understanding of Black politics under Jim Crow. While some Black bands' activities might have appeared to have been reinforcing racist stereotypes or advancing political agendas deleterious to Black people, in reality the bands...