Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life

Join the Boston University Initiative on Cities for the first event in the Race, Place, and Space series as we are joined by Paula Austin, Assistant Professor of History and African American Studies, for a discussion of her book, Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life.

Drawing on passages from the book and its historical context, Austin will discuss the everyday lives of young Black people in Washington DC during the 1930s, a period marked by racial, economic, and political segregation. Austin uses previously unstudied archival material to counter existing narratives and to portray young Black people as thinkers, theorists, critics, and commentators as they reckon with the boundaries imposed on them in the Jim Crow era of America’s capital city.

The Race, Place, and Space series, co-hosted by the Initiative on Cities, BU Arts Initiative, and BU Diversity & Inclusion, focuses on the ways in which racial and ethnic groups access, inhabit, occupy, shape, and are memorialized in urban contexts—as well as the ways their contemporary and historical contributions have been made invisible, disregarded, or denigrated. Learn more at bu.edu/ioc/rps