Dr. Paula Austin featured in Arts & Sciences magazine: A History of Racial Discrimination and the Fight for Change
Dr. Paula Austin, professor of History and African American Studies, is featured in the Arts & Sciences magazine article A History of Racial Discrimination and the Fight for Change by Marc Chalufour.
The article discusses Dr. Austin’s debut book, Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life (NYU Press, 2019), and its intersection with today’s protests against police brutality. In her book, Dr. Austin sheds light on the often-misrepresented Black youth of the Jim Crow era through her collection of interviews.
“I don’t think that we should be made to, or trying to, prove anybody’s humanity—we should be taking everybody’s humanity as a thing that already exists.” —Paula Austin
Description of her book from NYU Press:
The fullest account to date of African American young people in a segregated city
Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC offers a complex narrative of the everyday lives of black young people in a racially, spatially, economically, and politically restricted Washington, DC, during the 1930s. In contrast to the ways in which young people have been portrayed by researchers, policy makers, law enforcement, and the media, Paula C. Austin draws on previously unstudied archival material to present black poor and working class young people as thinkers, theorists, critics, and commentators as they reckon with the boundaries imposed on them in a Jim Crow city that was also the American emblem of equality.
The narratives at the center of this book provide a different understanding of black urban life in the early twentieth century, showing that ordinary people were expert at navigating around the limitations imposed by the District of Columbia’s racially segregated politics. Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC is a fresh take on the New Negro movement, and a vital contribution to the history of race in America.