Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South (review)

When Smita Narula, under the auspices of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch brought out Broken People: Caste Violence Against India's "Untouchables," the book was hailed as a major milestone in documenting the ways Caste definitions are used to oppress whole populations. By presenting first-person account interviews with more than 300 affected Dalits, and also lawyers, activists, and government officials involved in dealing with caste-based violence in India, Broken People provided powerful and alternative accounts of Caste discrimination that was able to counteract the official versions put out by the local, state and Central government authorities. Published in 1999, Broken People was one of the key evidences used by Dalit groups at the UN sponsored World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa in September, 2001, when they argued for the term "Caste" to be read similarly as "Race."

There is nothing new about activities like the project by Human Rights Watch that attempts to provide some kind of legitimacy—usually in print form in our discursively organized societies—to the voices of the nameless victims whose very status as victims denies them of any other subjectivity. When Ida B. Wells-Barnett set out to document in her Red Record the particulars of individual cases of lynching in the late 1800s—in the year 1882 alone there were 161 instances of lynching in the United States—she sought to provide a detailed and particularized set of reasons for the violence against black bodies that contradicted the officially given, singular reason of black male sexuality. When three successful, black shop owners were lynched in Memphis, Wells-Barnett openly attacked the ideal of White Womanhood that was used as an umbrella to cover all forms of brutalities against the black community. In retaliation, her newspaper office was burned out; in turn, Wells-Burnett responded by styling herself as the "Exiled," an identity that allowed her mobility and extended the field of her social activism (see Patricia A. Schecter's Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform 1880-1930).

If Wells-Barnett functioned as an activist in the public sphere, constantly questioning the Jim Crow legislations of her time (she had her Rosa Park moment too, and sued the public transportation company that forcibly made her move), the speakers in Remembering Jim Crow bear witness to the multiple ways in which they resisted, responded, survived, and slid around the dehumanizing edicts of the segregationist policies of their time. An ambitious, marvelously imaginative, massively coordinated and executed enterprise, the Behind the Veil Project took more than two decades to collect, edit, organize and present the more than 1,265 interviews collected and now stored at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. As the editors note in the Introduction, the need to allow African American housewives, sharecroppers, church organizers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, miners, and civil rights movement activists to speak was to showcase "the extraordinary resilience of black citizens, who, individually and collectively, found ways to endure, fight back, and occasionally define their own destinies" (xxx).

Interestingly, the editors make it a point to claim that these recollections of those who lived in the midst of white terror is not to merely document the various instances of white on black violence. Thus the project of Remembering Jim Crow is qualitatively different from the Human Rights Watch documentation of violence against Dalits in Broken People. In the latter, even when there were indications within the given testimonies of how men and women coped against systematic violence, of how certain individuals questioned the brutality of public officials on behalf of others, and of how besieged communities survived under terrible conditions, the scope and focus of the book does not allow for the framing of these aspects to be highlighted. In Remembering Jim Crow, the editors are clear...