In Jim Crow Capital, Murphy fuses social history’s fine-grained examinations with political history’s grand narratives. The result is a welcome contribution to black women’s history that reveals the pivotal role that the nation’s capital played in the long civil-rights movement. By combining formal and informal political action, Murphy adeptly switches between the terrain of local politics and a more national perspective. Indeed, particularly in her early chapters, Murphy is attentive to the spatial and symbolic elements of activism. She opens with a map of black women’s organizations and a description of an anti-lynching parade’s route around Washington’s famous monuments. Murphy demonstrates that public commemoration was itself a terrain of struggle as activists championed black leaders such as Frederick Douglass while deriding a proposed “mammy” memorial.
Murphy’s most innovative findings are about police brutality, a growing problem in the early years of the Great Depression. Documenting police brutality against black...