Jacobson, Matthew Frye

OUR SYNOPSIS: Matthew Frye Jacobson explores the long civil rights era through the story of Sammy Davis Jr. He emphasizes that “Davis moved through practically every kind of space and genre that the culture industries provided, and so his career illuminates with unusual clarity the workings of race in these industries across a wide swath of the twentieth century.” (26) He also actively crossed generations through his work, for example continuing to perform elements of the turn of the century vaudeville tradition into the 1950s and 1960s. Davis himself made clear his first unfiltered experience of American racism came when he was conscripted into World War II. Jacobson argues that the racial contradictions of this war proved to Davis the power of using his cultural work to influence social change. After the war, “Davis pursued a version of success in the entertainment industry that was dependent upon breaching Jim Crowed spaces” even as racialized cultural forms persisted. (158) He embodied integration through his performances, visibly representing Black self-assertion while Black workers across industries supported this work through grassroots resistance. Jacobsen shows that through his work in the Rat Pack starting in the 1950s, Davis broke racial barriers but continued to perform and contend with racist tropes. One of Jacobson’s most intriguing arguments is that in his autobiographical work “Davis’s thesis that his talent will overcome bigotry is shown to be flat wrong.” (359)