Outside the Lines: Civil Rights as a Way of Life

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 nineteenth century and the Second World War. Flamming chronicles changes within the black community as a whole, but also provides intricate portraits of the lives of individual leaders in the fields of politics, business, journalism, community organization, and civil rights activism. Based on these richly drawn sketches of such leaders and the community they served, the author makes a convincing case that the standard narratives of black life during the age of segregation—and, importantly, the analytical dichotomies often used by historians of the era— simply do not fit.

In its broadest application, Flamming's approach challenges the conventional chronologies of Jim Crow America. Here, the author confronts two contradictory arcs. The national narrative has, since the days of Rayford Logan, argued that African Americans made a slow ascension from "the nadir" of the late nineteenth century, when the hopes of emancipation crumbled before the new system of social segregation, economic injustice, and political exclusion. Rising from those depths, this story argues, African Americans steadily worked to better their conditions on all fronts and, in so doing, lay the foundation for the modern civil rights movement. In contrast to the triumphalist national narrative, the local story has been one of steady declension. Unlike their counterparts elsewhere, blacks in Los Angeles generally remembered the 1880s and 1890s as a "golden age" during which they were forced to endure little (if any) discrimination and enjoyed high rates of homeownership, good jobs with decent wages, and fair representation in the public sphere. As the twentieth century wore on, this version holds, their hard-won rights and respectability were steadily eroded.

In the end, Flamming finds both narratives to be simplistic. "At any given moment," he writes, "the [black] community was only half-free and locked in struggle—fighting to maintain and extend basic human rights." Major accomplishments could be quickly erased, but significant setbacks were often corrected...