West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California's Color Line

Abstract

In West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California's Color Line, Lynn M. Hudson explores how blackness and whiteness were constructed and contested in California from its founding as a state through the mid-twentieth century. Hudson shows the simultaneous durability and instability of Jim Crow segregation as she peoples her narrative with Black women and men who contested the color line and refused white supremacy. This history details the ways in which race and citizenship were negotiated through a complex entanglement of public and private spaces, discourses of scientific racism, desires for self-determination, racialized frontier violence, and legal struggle.Though the West and North have long been seen as an exception to the brutalities of the American South, the color line and Jim Crow in California evince the same racial anxiety and protectiveness over whiteness that animated racial bigotry throughout the country. Hudson plays with the south-as-reference and shows how California was distinct in its methods for controlling citizens of color. Hudson accomplishes this, in part, through the organization of her book. Using themes roughly mapped onto chronologies, she pans in and out of various sites and scales that highlight the ways segregation was formally and informally upheld and publicly and privately resisted. She begins by considering the state's founding as she plumbs anti-blackness and considers how it factored into early law, and how slavery, as an institution, informed early settler attitudes and state governance. She then transports readers to the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco as a site in which Black club women sought to respond to the rising tide of scientific racism with parades that centered Black achievement and patriotism. Hudson moves to the Central Valley as she situates the founding of Allensworth, an all-Black colony, within the larger struggle for Black homeownership and self-determination. She details the state's very public experience with lynching that captivated the nation and how the second Klan found fertile ground in California, penetrating municipal government and the police force and engaging in racial terrorism. Finally, she concludes her history in the segregated swimming pools of Southern California, focusing on the embodied memories of exclusion, the anxiety of racial miscegenation, and legal challenges mounted decades before Brown that would pilot the legal arguments of the Civil Rights Era. Hudson's attentiveness to centering Black lives, in particular the lives of Black women, is accomplished through her extensive use of oral history, the Black media, and the work of Black intellectuals and journalists writing in the early twentieth century.Hudson's book contributes to our understanding of how Jim Crow and the color line were not simply Southern phenomena, but were also central to the settler colonial and white supremacist roots of the United States as a whole. As one Black migrant explained it “The only difference between Pasadena and Mississippi is the way they are spelled” (p. 208). Another key contribution of the book comes from Hudson's consciousness of the intersectional nature of oppression as she meditates on gender and class while thinking about race, showing the variation of thought within the Black community and dispelling the notion that it was somehow monolithic. In this vein, she also shows how blackness and whiteness operated in relation to other racial norms and political differences by bringing in the stories of Asian Americans and Mexican Americans.While the phrase, the “color line,” forms part of the language we have at our disposal as historians of race and racism, reaching back to Frederick Douglass and popularized by W.E.B. Du Bois, the image of a line doesn't adequately describe the way segregation, as a set of practices, beliefs, and struggles, happened in California—it was messier, more dynamic, and less stable. And Hudson's book illuminates just that: how contestations over public and private spaces as they related to race were tied together through the web of resistance that Black Californians engaged in as they utilized tactics that would become better known in the mid-twentieth century.