Book Review: Watching Jim Crow

In Watching Jim Crow, the author, Steven D. Classen, takes on the white supremacist patriarchal homophobic telling of history to recreate a genuine history that is not misguided as other so-called neutral historical stories. Instead his telling of the history of Mississippi’s local television networks in Jackson, Mississippi is shown through the lens of the present to accent the fact that there is no such thing as a “neutral” historical text, only texts shown through the preconceptions of a certain time period. The same is true for the idea of laws, which is well known in the black community where slavery was considered a legal form of commerce until less than two hundred years ago.

Classen’s work on how the main two broadcasting networks of Jackson, Mississippi were systematically removing black voices from public discourse is somewhat shocking until we think of the things we’ve learned in other works for this course. Here Classen talks about the ways that the courts and broadcasting stations worked together to silence black problems with the networks:

“While benevolent federal courts recoded black voices and concerns as those of abstract consumers, a supremacist ventriloquism in and around Jackson spoke of African American contentment with the status quo –the notion of the happy satisfaction grounded in a lack of desire or appreciation on the part of blacks for the cultural, economics, and educational opportunities afforded whites.”(75)

Even though this muting was going on, “various activisms, even with limited goals and resources, exposed coercion, and in doing so, temporarily disabled the creation of consensus necessary to white segregationist power”(77). Through Classen’s work we get a detailed account of how exactly blacks were struggling against the broadcasting networks in the late 50’s and the 60’s.

One problem that Classen had while writing this work was that there was a lack of a paper trail on the part of the small grassroots black activists that got so many changes made. It makes sense that, “given climate of terrorism existing in the sixties, these organizations would have been extraordinarily courageous, if not foolhardy, to preserve documents detailing complaints, challenges, and strategic interventions leveled against very powerful institutions” (140). So he uses oral tradition to get an idea of what it was really like to live in Jackson during this revolutionary time period. He notes that it was often teachers and female professionals that were doing the small good things that people in Jackson remembered as having made a difference. It’s hard to remember that even the Civil Rights movement was patriarchal in its nature with only men leading the large civil rights organizations but here Classen gives credit where credit is due.

Classen ends his work with a warning from one of his interviewees that, “We can’t let people forget, else we go back” (174). Television is more than just a way to pass time it is often used as a medium of white supremacist power to dictate what we consider to be “neutral” or “normal” and Classen notes that“while television is commonly regarded as a corporate technology and an increasingly conglomerated business, it is far more: it is something that people do.”(195)