Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life<\/em><\/a> (NYU Press) was published in late 2019, a few months after Austin joined the CAS faculty as an assistant professor of history and African American studies.<\/p>\nAustin\u2019s book draws on interviews conducted by Frazier and William Henry Jones, also a Howard sociologist, to illuminate the Black youth who grew up under the Jim Crow laws of segregated Washington, D.C. It also creates a stark contrast to past depictions of this community by the media, law enforcement, historians, and even Frazier himself\u2014and highlights important parallels to the racism and segregation still prevalent in America.<\/p>\n
History\u2019s Nameless<\/h2>\n Frazier was a big name in early 1900s academia, publishing dozens of papers and books about the African American community. In 1948, he would become the first Black president of the American Sociological Association. Over time, though, Frazier\u2019s work has proven problematic. He shed light on the impacts of racism and segregation, but he also perpetuated negative stereotypes about rural and poor Black families. In Negro Youth at the Crossways<\/em>, he argued that his subjects suffered from feelings of inferiority created by Jim Crow policies and that they needed rehabilitation. Working with the same interviews, Austin reached very different conclusions. She discovered thoughtful teenagers who shared dreams unbound by the segregation and racism they recognized around them. \u201cI was just astounded at the kinds of answers that these young people were giving,\u201d Austin says.<\/p>\nIf historians are looking for the lives, the experiences, the kind of intellectual production of poor and working-class people, generally we don\u2019t have records of them.<\/p>\n
Paula Austin<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Austin visited Howard at least once a year for six or seven years, sometimes staying for weeks at a time. She paged through more than 20 boxes of materials in the Frazier collection, plus more in Jones\u2019 papers. In the unedited transcripts, she discovered an intimate look at the lives, thoughts, and dreams of Black adolescents in the Jim Crow era, the stories of the sons and daughters of laundresses, firemen, and oyster harvesters. The voice that rose above all of the others belonged to 14-year-old Susie Morgan.<\/p>\n
For more than a year, Austin knew little about the teenager. Frazier and his interviewers anonymized their work, replacing names with numerals. Individual number 22 had one of the largest files in the collection. It started in 1938, spanned two years, and was filled with vivid details about her life, including leading a local gang of friends called the Union Street Sports and clashing with police.<\/p>\nA Washington, D.C., street in July 1941. Photo by Edwin Rosskam, Farm Security Administration; from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA\/OWI Collection<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nAustin\u2019s first presentation about her research focused on boys and street gangs. She drew heavily from individual 22\u2014who she assumed was a boy. Then, Austin discovered a stapled packet labeled \u201cBoys\u201d and another labeled \u201cGirls.\u201d Names matched with numerals lined each page. \u201cI remember my excitement and joy,\u201d Austin says. She cross-referenced the key with the interviews and discovered the identity of her mystery boy: Susie Morgan. Austin had to revise that first presentation\u2014and check her gender assumptions\u2014but she features Morgan prominently in her book.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe\u2019s so forthcoming and dynamic,\u201d Austin says. \u201cI was just so impressed with her as a person.\u201d Beyond Morgan\u2019s interactions with the police, Austin was captivated by the way she explored the city, roaming well beyond the Southwest\u2014and even swimming in the dangerous waters of the Washington Channel, which runs into the Potomac River.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe sounded so knowledgeable about her own self,\u201d Austin says. \u201cI\u2019m sure there\u2019s a bunch of stuff that we don\u2019t know about Susie\u2014about pain and trauma\u2014but so much of her interview is about her strength and claiming power for herself in terms of her movement around the city.\u201d It\u2019s a perspective often missing from the historical record, which relies heavily on writings and documents left by the upper classes.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t think that we should be made to, or trying to, prove anybody\u2019s humanity\u2014we should be taking everybody\u2019s humanity as a thing that already exists.<\/p>\n
Paula Austin<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\u201cIf historians are looking for the lives, the experiences, the kind of intellectual production of poor and working-class people, generally we don\u2019t have records of them,\u201d Austin says. Youth are also often ignored or stereotyped. \u201cChildren aren\u2019t leaving archival sources for us to look at,\u201d she says. These groups, Austin writes in her book, typically show up as statistics: \u201cNameless, faceless, and voiceless, rendered only in the aggregate as an urban monolith.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Austin sees this changing. \u201cIn the last 25 years, the field has been growing\u2014and histories of minoritized and marginalized peoples have been growing enormously,\u201d she says. With more historians turning to sources from other disciplines, like Frazier\u2019s sociology research, they\u2019ve learned \u201cto write things that are more accurate about communities that have historically been left out of the record.\u201d<\/p>\n
A History of Dehumanization<\/h2>\n As Austin uncovered the narratives in Frazier\u2019s papers, his interviewees\u2019 stories of racism resonated. Michael Brown, an African American teenager, was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., while Austin was writing her dissertation. She recognized the dehumanizing language used by law enforcement and in the media to describe Brown\u2014as something \u201cbeastly,\u201d or something other than a typical teenage boy\u2014from her research.<\/p>\nTwo boys reading on a doorstep in Washington, D.C., in November 1942. Photo by Gordon Parks, Farm Security Administration; from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA\/OWI Collection<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nIn her book, Austin notes the history of such language within academia, citing words such as \u201cdevious\u201d and \u201cunwholesome\u201d being used to describe recreational activities in a poor Black community. And that language can be traced from the treatment of enslaved people, who weren\u2019t considered human, through the 1990s, when Hillary Clinton labeled gang members as \u201csuperpredators,\u201d to the present day. \u201cThis is true for boys in particular, and it has led to not just mistreatment and abuse but in some cases death,\u201d Austin says.<\/p>\n
The Frazier interviews tell the urban, Black experience in the first person. And for Austin, they revealed the humanity of the subjects. \u201cI don\u2019t think that we should be made to, or trying to, prove anybody\u2019s humanity\u2014we should be taking everybody\u2019s humanity as a thing that already exists.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seeing a Future<\/h2>\n Another interviewee who figures prominently in Austin\u2019s book is 17-year-old Myron Ross. He expressed frustration over the presence of a whites-only playground in his predominantly Black neighborhood. And he identified the inequities in the treatment of white versus Black Boy Scouts at a jamboree held in D.C. But even as Ross analyzed the limitations that Jim Crow forced on his life, he expressed his desire to travel and attend college. \u201cPeople could look at young people in the impoverished conditions, oppressed conditions that they live in, and say that their ideas about their future are naive, that kid is never going to do that,\u201d Austin says. \u201cBut they\u2019re able to see a future for themselves, despite the conditions under which they are being forced to live.\u201d<\/p>\nA March 1942 high school science class in Washington, D.C. Photo by Marjorie Collins, Farm Security Administration; from the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA\/OWI Collection<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nAustin sees such valuable lessons in the lives of Frazier\u2019s subjects that she wants to find out more about them. Some of that work paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, with archives closed and many materials inaccessible, but she has plans to collaborate with Prologue DC, a group of women historians creating D.C.-based multimedia stories<\/a>. Austin hopes to translate some of her subjects\u2019 lives to digital map stories, showing their movements around the city and the evolution of their neighborhood, which was giving way to federal government construction at the time of Frazier\u2019s research.<\/p>\nTo build those maps, Austin needs more data\u2014from the census and obituaries. And, she hopes, from oral histories collected from relatives of her subjects. Since her book\u2019s release, Austin has met Ross\u2019 widow and a cousin, who told her that he graduated from Howard with an electrical engineering degree. \u201cHe became the person that he\u2019s talking about as a teenager,\u201d Austin says. \u201cThis idea that young people who are in poor and working-class communities are somehow doomed, it\u2019s a wrong idea.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey not only understand the conditions under which they are living but they are also able, despite that, to see a future for themselves\u2014and feel deserving of that future. That is the thing that I\u2019d like for the book to bring into the contemporary moment, in terms of how we think about young people in poor, working-class communities.\u201d<\/p>\n
History Repeats<\/h2>\n After the 1938 protests, Washington, D.C., reformed its police department, establishing a civilian review board and hiring more Black officers. But racist harassment didn\u2019t end\u2014protesters took to the streets again in 1941. Later that decade, the city promoted a new police chief who had several acts of brutality on his record.<\/p>\n
Austin saw the weeks after the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer unfold in a similar way: protests broke out around the world\u2014as did the familiar demands for change. \u201cSo many people don\u2019t actually know that many of the calls for reforms that they are making now are not at all new,\u201d Austin says. \u201cThey were tried in the \u201930s, in the \u201940s, in the \u201950s, and we\u2019re still here.\u201d<\/p>\n
But, Austin says, one thing has changed this time. \u201cWe moved to this call for defunding the police, for reallocating resources into other parts of communities,\u201d she says. \u201cI do think this is a different moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Measuring that difference will take time, but the moment\u2019s arrival has heightened the importance of Austin\u2019s work. \u201cI don\u2019t have the privilege of saying, \u2018This is just an interesting historical story that I want to tell,\u2019 as opposed to feeling like maybe this could save lives,\u201d she says. \u201cMaybe that\u2019s too grandiose a thought about my scholarship, but when I work on it, it feels important in that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
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