THE JIM CROW SOUTH
Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in
the Segregated South. Edited by William H. Chafe, Raymond
Gavins, and Robert Korstad, with Paul Ortiz, Robert Parrish, Jennifer
Ritterhouse, Keisha Roberts, and Nicole Waligora-Davis. New York: The
New Press, In Association with Lyndhurst Brooks of the Center for Documentary
Studies of Duke University. 2001. xxxv + 346 pp. Illustrations, appendices,
and index. Two one- hour audio CDs. $55.00.
Susan Bragg
University of Washington
In 1995, African American veteran Tolbert Chism explained his interest
in black history to an interviewer, saying, "You see, our education as
black people had been limited to only what the whites wanted us to know
about ourselves, but nothing from our background as to what our origin
was and where we had come from. I found that out" (p. 76). Chism's story
of his self-education is one of many powerful histories included in Remembering
Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South. This
primary source collection emerged from Duke University's Behind the Veil
project to document African American experiences in the South, a project
which produced over 1,300 interviews with elderly African Americans from
diverse regions and communities. The result is a dense and compelling
series of oral histories that reveal both the necessary accommodations
to the systems of racial oppression known collectively as Jim Crow and
the daily protests against such discrimination. Accompanied by two compact
discs that contain audio selections from many of the interviews, this
collection is an excellent teaching tool, giving students a glimpse into
the variety of ways that Jim Crow segregation shaped the lives of African
Americans and, of course, Southerners in general.
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