Abstract
In Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life, Paula C. Austin, a historian, produces an interdisciplinary text with major implications for contemporary sociologists and sociological research. Austin begins the book by laying out the goal of her study: to “highlight the inner and everyday lives, the self-aware and self-reflective analytic frameworks cultivated and articulated by poor and working-class [B]lack young people in an urban and social history of Jim Crow Washington, DC” (p. 2).
In order to complete this goal, Austin employs archival research methodologies, revisiting studies conducted by William H. Jones and E. Franklin Frazier, Black sociologists and heads of the Howard University Sociology Department in the 1920s and 1930s, respectively, as well as engaging in analysis of supplementary reports, public policy papers, academic theses and dissertations, census data, and newspaper articles. In reigniting analyses of these studies, Austin delves into the narratives of the Black youth who served as research participants, revisiting the narratives themselves, interpretations made by the researchers around these narratives, and parts of the story left out in the final published pieces. In her analysis and throughout the book, Austin calls for us, as researchers, to be critical of reinscribing structures and tropes we seek to dismantle, to set aside our traditional understandings and interpretations of what is considered significant in social life, and to recenter everyday lives and livelihoods.
Austin, in the three chapters composing the portion of the book that covers the rich narratives of the participants, points to the complex ways that Black youth claimed and reclaimed public spaces while also participating in sanctioned recreational activities, were aware of the injustices of their city and were “engaged in both actions against and the cultivation of ideas about them” (p. 92), and carried “wish images” of bright futures they were able and willing to articulate both in response to and despite structural disadvantages. Austin produces a text that invites us to think beyond discourses of deficiency, homogenization, pathology, and mere survival to see young Black people as complex beings possessing a subjectivity that is not always tied to and hampered by structural disadvantage, but rather is brimming with significance that comes from possessing interiority, a term borrowed from poets and literary theorists referring to a person’s inherent inner character. Austin centers this interiority, thus recentering the humanity of the Black youth who served as research participants in studies conducted nearly a century ago.