Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America since 1940 by Jonathan Scott Holloway (review)

The title of this book, Jim Crow Wisdom, comes from Richard Wright’s essay, The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch (New York: Viking Press, 1937). In that work, Wright recounts an incident from his childhood when he fought with white boys, after which his mother beat him with a barrel stave for fighting. The message, according to Wright, was that blacks must never make trouble for and always accede to whites in order to survive. This “wisdom” amounted to a set of cultural cues and values that enabled blacks to avoid physical abuse and punishment from whites most, but not all, of the time, yet also a wisdom that ate away at a black sense of pride, both individual and racial. John Scott Holloway traces the ways in which African American writers, intellectuals, performers, and academics first accepted and then rejected Wright’s notion of Jim Crow wisdom in the middle of the twentieth century and the implications that these changes of perception had on him, his family, and cultural institutions that preserve African American history.

Holloway begins by examining the work of black social scientists such as Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, as well as the work of white Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, who hired nearly forty black scholars to do the work for his bellwether sociological study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper Brothers, 1944). All of these scholars tended to downplay the aspects of black community life that white readers would find objectionable and to reflect the values and priorities of the black middle class, which strove for acceptance by the white majority, in their publications. As Holloway points out, this sanitized version of the cumulative experience of African American life ignored the anger of the large black underclass toward racial discrimination and their behavioral, cultural, and artistic expressions of life as an underclass that reflected sensuality, eroticism, and suffering. This repression is seen in the work of African American writers who, rather than lashing out in anger at their white tormentors, withdrew inwardly in shame and humiliation in numerous publications.

The book then moves on to examine the shift away from reliance on Jim Crow wisdom in the 1960s, especially in the ways that black bodies are depicted in words, in performances, in documentaries, and in academia. As Holloway details, John Howard Griffin, in Black Like Me (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), and other white and black authors touched upon, if ever so slightly, the range of emotions that African Americans lived with on a daily basis, including the strains, stresses, and occasional physical violence that came with encounters with whites. Various artists, like those at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, exhibited a remarkable range of dancing talent and choreography that expressed the pain and yearnings of black life. Black documentarians in the 1960s created unapologetic depictions of black communities in that era that compelled viewers to admit that the supposed truths of the Jim Crow era were and always had been falsehoods perpetrated by whites, for whites, and against blacks. And African American studies programs and departments in colleges and universities began to gain acceptance in higher education by fits and starts, with difficult beginnings and considerable opposition from white academics.

Holloway encounters many problems when he diverges from his excellent historical analysis into an extended reflection on his parents and grandparents, the challenges they faced in a white world, and how they remembered their experiences decades later when Holloway was finally old enough to understand what his family had been through. Although a moving account of his family’s history, this chapter does not follow the agenda laid out so well in the first four chapters. Holloway was apparently trying to introduce a personal voice into his narrative, to bring the larger historical issues down to the level of individuals struggling...