Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture.(Book Review)

Publication: Journal of Popular Culture

Publication Date: 01-NOV-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. W. T. Lhamon, Jr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003; and The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. Ed. Christopher Metress. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.

In the fiftieth anniversary year of the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Supreme Court decision, two authors give us never previously collected documents in very different volumes about the personification of racism in America as the history of Jim Crow. Lhamon's book places Jim Crow in the period before the Civil War as a popular culture figure of the market revolution who becomes "an inaugural icon of international popular culture" (8). Based on research in archives in England and the United States, Lhamon provides an original and interdisciplinary analytical introduction to a Jim Crow "cultural collage" (385). The...

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