Dancing Down the Barricades
Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A deep dive into racial politics, Hollywood, and Black cultural struggles for liberation as reflected in the extraordinary life and times of Sammy Davis Jr.
Through the lens of Sammy Davis Jr.'s six-decade career in show business—from vaudeville to Vegas to Broadway, Hollywood, and network TV—Dancing Down the Barricades examines the workings of race in American culture. The title phrase holds two contradictory meanings regarding Davis's cultural politics: Did he dance the barricades down, as he liked to think, or did he simply dance down them, as his more radical critics would have it?
Davis was at once a pioneering, barrier-busting, anti–Jim Crow activist and someone who was widely associated with accommodationism and wannabe whiteness. Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson attends to both threads, analyzing how industry norms, productions, scripts, roles, and audience expectations and responses were all framed by race against the backdrop of a changing America. In the spirit of better understanding Davis's life and career, Dancing Down the Barricades examines the complexities of his constraints, freedoms, and choices for what they reveal about Black history and American political culture.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intriguing deep dive, Yale University historian Jacobson (Roots Too) places singer and actor Sammy Davis Jr. (1925–1990) at the center of the intersection between race, culture, and politics in America. Tracking Davis's career from his earliest days in vaudeville as a young man to his later years on television, Jacobson provides a deeper understanding of the racial tightrope Davis had to walk. While the Rat Pack's cringeworthy racial banter was meant to signal their relative progressivism, Jacobson writes, Davis's participation "embodied neither resistance nor defiance nor critique nor self-definition." Jacobson also contextualizes the "popular obsession" over Davis's "predilection for dating white women" within the history of efforts to police interracial relationships in the U.S. and takes a deep dive into Davis's star turn in the 1964 revival of Golden Boy, which featured Broadway's first interracial kiss. Later chapters offer a close reading of Davis's autobiography Yes I Can and chart his changing fortunes as the Black Power era dawned. Nuanced, incisive, and frequently surprising, this is a worthy reconsideration of a divisive public figure.
