The fullest account to date of African American young people in a segregated city
Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC offers a complex narrative of the everyday lives of black young people in a racially, spatially, economically, and politically restricted Washington, DC, during the 1930s. In contrast to the ways in which young people have been portrayed by researchers, policy makers, law enforcement, and the media, Paula C. Austin draws on previously unstudied archival material to present black poor and working class young people as thinkers, theorists, critics, and commentators as they reckon with the boundaries imposed on them in a Jim Crow city that was also the American emblem of equality.
The narratives at the center of this book provide a different understanding of black urban life in the early twentieth century, showing that ordinary people were expert at navigating around the limitations imposed by the District of Columbia’s racially segregated politics. Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC is a fresh take on the New Negro movement, and a vital contribution to the history of race in America.

"A superlative analysis [...] Austin restores the humanity of poor and working-class black youth, who lived through the Jim Crow era in Washington, D.C., by reading against the grain. She locates the ideas, thoughts, and intellectual frameworks of youths such as seventeen-year-old Louise Freely, who wrote twelve poems that were simply discarded by the social science investigators who deemed her thoughts unimportant to their larger sociological analysis of black youths in the district at the time. Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC might be easily used in several courses in the humanities and social sciences." - The Journal of Southern History

"An excellent roadmap for the elusive quest to illuminate the everyday lives of black children in the nation’s capital [...] Her methodological insights will be of great value to scholars of the African-American experience." - The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"Coming of Age is an invaluable addition to Washington, DC social and cultural studies, which are a constant dialogue among history, symbol, access, inclusion—a clash between lofty promises and failed ideals." - Washington History