William Sturkey. Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White.

Extract

William Sturkey’s Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White is a beautifully written, engrossing, and deeply researched community study of Jim Crow as viewed through the nuanced lens of “a quintessential town of the ‘New South’” (3). By spotlighting the “Hub City,” established in 1880 as a railroad town equidistant from New Orleans, Mobile, and Jackson, Sturkey shows how Jim Crow developed in tandem with southern modernization. Sturkey holds nothing back as he emphasizes the physical, economic, political, and social violence of white supremacist culture “that ground relentlessly into the bodies and souls of black people” (86), but he insists that black Hattiesburgers during Jim Crow were not simply victims but actors making calculated decisions for themselves, their families, and their neighbors. Because of wages made possible by modernization and discrimination that forced all black southerners, regardless of social rank, into the same neighborhood, residents created a nurturing, proud, and independent community centered around thriving businesses on Mobile Street. Sturkey points out that as many as three thousand black residents, about a third of the city’s black population, participated in the civil rights activities of Freedom Summer in 1964 (2). While Patricia Michelle Boyett has chronicled Hattiesburg’s postwar civil rights movement in Right to Revolt: The Crusade for Racial Justice in Mississippi’s Central Piney Woods (2015), Sturkey demonstrates how the city’s long history of black self-determination and unity made possible such tremendous civil rights activism.