Since the publication of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past” (2005), historical scholarship has scrutinized and discarded the traditional framing of the civil rights movement; that dominant narrative begins in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education and ends with conservative white backlash in the late 1960s. The currently in-vogue “long civil rights movement” scholarship denounces that narrative as an opportunistic artifice of the New Right, a political manipulation of racial memory which obscures as much as it reveals. Jonathan Holloway adopts Hall's modern historiographical stance in Jim Crow Wisdom, which might be described as an examination of self-creation and identity production in black America. More specifically, this volume studies the voices of a “black identity that is engaged in a battle to secure full citizenship rights,” and seeks to observe the articulation of this voice through “personal and public memories, academic and popular literature, dance, film, and heritage tourism” in order to fully reflect the “consistencies and contradictions embedded in the construction of the African American character” (2). These inherent contradictions – in identity politics and otherwise – serve as the volume's most memorable leitmotif. A lengthy introduction discusses Pierre Nora's dialectic of history and memory, accepting that while the former ineluctably does violence to the latter, “the literal truth is less important … than the act of remembrance itself,” because that act is a dominant force in the generation of identity (8). A third-person omniscient narrative mode is eschewed in favor of a unique perspective which alternates between first-person recollections of the author's upper-middle-class upbringing and more traditional examinations of sociocultural history. The resulting synthesis of memoir and archival history is a stylistic achievement.

Of the work's six chapters, the first four make up a significant academic contribution. At the start of each chapter the author draws on personal memory to examine incidents that correspond to an appraisal of a sociocultural or artistic phenomenon which modifies or produces some aspect of black identity. Chapter 1 opens with an anecdote about the author's aunt who refuses to acknowledge any ties to her enslaved ancestors. Holloway asserts that her silence is characteristic of the black bourgeoisie's urge to forget; upper-class black people could assert their respectability by replacing a history of subjugation with a false narrative of “good breeding” whereby their ancestors were not subjugated. Holloway's childhood recollection is enhanced by an analysis of Richard Wright's disaffection with this middle-class practice of “editing” out the dark and brutal elements of the black experience; that experience produced “Bigger Thomas,” whose existence is antithetical to the middle-class conception of African American life. The chapter contains a notable critique of Wright's association with race-focussed social scientists at the University of Chicago. Abundant references to ethnographic field studies in Wright's essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” (1940) are said to be the result of his involvement with Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, among other Chicago-based scholars. Holloway's dissection of the race literature reveals that “average” black men were never successfully interviewed by these social scientists, which problematizes Wright's putative reliance on sociological fieldwork.

After explaining the genesis of collaborative journalistic projects such as “My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience,” Holloway transitions to recollections of John H. Johnson publications such as Ebony and Jet. Indeed, the assertion that Ebony condemned Wright's glorification of the oppressed African American by displaying only those select few who enjoyed the privilege of wealth and white luxuries is made palpable by a photograph of Holloway's maternal grandfather playing tennis with a leader of the National Urban League.

Perhaps the most powerful contribution in these pages is to the history of African American studies (and thus also the history of black students attending university). Several questions are raised in trying to understand the development of the discipline. Which narratives are most important? Who decides which memories matter? Holloway asks, “What does it mean for a discipline when it grows out of traumatic memory?” (105). As a tenure-track professor of ethnic studies in the 1980s, his experience provides the foundation for a study calling upon an impressive array of black voices in academia. One hitherto uncited document is John Hope Franklin's “Dilemma of the American Negro Scholar” (1963), in which Franklin asserts that systemic racism forced rising black scholars to abandon academic ambitions; they had a public duty to defend the equal status of African American scholars. Franklin's assertion is strengthened by a case study of the now forgotten J. Saunders Redding, examinations of student protests at San Francisco State and Cornell, a 1969 Columbia Spectator article arguing for the inclusion of African American studies in the curriculum, a Yale Alumni Magazine interview with a black student about his experience at the university, and anecdotes from Redding's students. The interplay between the catalog of historical sources and Holloway's retracing of his own academic ascent combine to make what may be the definitive study of the African American academic.

If there is a significant shortcoming that plagues Jim Crow Wisdom, it is likely in the author's indictment of sociologists of race who supposedly fostered “edited” memories because their work did not represent the “average” African American. In particular, Gunnar Myrdal is criticized for his “assertion of black proximity to white normativity” (28), as well as the claim that higher-class African Americans imitated the dominant white culture. Holloway does not provide evidence that there was or is a set of essentially black norms that differs from those of their supposed white counterparts, and his evaluation of popular literature seems only to support Myrdal's arguments.

Jim Crow Wisdom is a powerful interdisciplinary study of black cultural discourse. A unique narrative structure renders it very readable, while original contributions to the histories of African American studies and twentieth-century social science make for a worthwhile scholarly resource. It will prove an important source for students, historians, and anyone else interested in the production of racial identity.