Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South.

Edited by William H. Chafe, Raymond Gavins, Robert Korstad, and others. (New York: The New Press, in association with Lyndhurst Books of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, c. 2001. Pp. [xxxviii], 346, and two audio compact discs. $55.00, ISBN 1-56584-697-4.)

Inspired by the insights into the lives of "ordinary people" provided by oral histories of the civil rights and labor movements, the editors of this collection have pieced together a set of interviews that move beyond "the two-dimensional story of oppression and submission" that has defined Jim Crow (p. xxix). Remembering Jim Crow is drawn from the "Behind the Veil" project, a research endeavor based at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Over the course of three years, historians and graduate students at historically black colleges and universities and predominantly white institutions conducted 1,265 interviews with "average citizens" (p. xxix) in twenty-five communities in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Women and men, agricultural and urban, poor and middle-class folk were all represented. Seventy-two of these interviews are collected in this hardcover book-and-CD set, which is also illustrated with black-and-white photographs, many of them donated by the informants.

The editors begin with an introduction to the twentieth-century segregated South and the lessons learned from "[b]lack elders who survived Jim Crow" (p. xv). What follows are thematic chapters of interview excerpts with brief editorial introductions. The "bitter truths" of "the dailiness of the terror blacks experienced at the hands of capricious whites" (p. xxx) comprise the first lesson. For example, a participant from Texas remembers that when she was eleven years old, white policemen drove by and exposed themselves to her while she was waiting at the bus stop. In other chapters participants recall the importance of family and community in helping individuals to survive and resist Jim Crow. Memories of slavery were passed on by elders to strengthen the will of a younger generation. Families and neighbors protected one another, hiding men in danger of being lynched and laboring on the farms of families with too few able-bodied hands to make their crops. African American adults pooled their resources to provide for black teachers who would teach longer than the four or five months allotted to them by whites in power. Participants recall a variety of work experiences, from the fight to end segregation in a coal-mining union in Alabama to the way that a sharecropping family in Georgia in the 1930s was coldly cheated out of money owed to them for crops they produced. Remembering Jim Crow ends with a strong chapter on "resistance and political struggles" (chap. 6). G. K. Butterfield remembers his father's successful run for local office in North Carolina in 1953, while others remember physical resistance. Henry Hooten of Alabama recalls his use of economic pressure to persuade a white gas-station owner to open up his restaurant to black families on the bus Hooten was driving to a distant beach. The introductions to these chapters are informed by recent historiography, yet the entire work remains accessible to a general readership.

The first CD, an American RadioWorks documentary produced by Minnesota Public Radio and National Public Radio, mixes narration with clips from the interviews. It also contains a segment in which anthropologist Kate Ellis recorded whites as well as blacks in Louisiana telling their contrasting memories of Jim Crow. The second CD offers excerpts of the interviews in the book, which enables the listener to hear interviewees' voices and all of their nuances.

Remembering Jim Crow is significant because it provides a multitude of new evidence about everyday resistance, a subject that has been well documented in studies of slavery but that has only recently been explored in depth by historians of the Jim Crow South, such as Glenda E. Gilmore, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Tera W. Hunter, Leon F. Litwack, and Neil R. McMillen. Beyond its scholarly significance, this book-and-CD set will also be valuable in the classroom. The editors' careful selection and thematic grouping of the interviews reveal the similarities and differences in African American experiences of Jim Crow. The disadvantage of this thematic organization, however, is that the reader loses a specific sense of place. While there is a brief appendix containing biographical information about the informants, Remembering Jim Crow could have used a brief description of each region and a map of the South marking the locations of the interviews. But this is a minor criticism, and I predict that this collection, as well as the larger Behind the Veil project, will become an integral part of future interpretations of the Jim Crow South.

MONICA MARIA TETZLAFF

Indiana University South Bend