In Coming of Age in Jim Crow D.C., Austin critically investigates the subjectivities of African-American children in interwar Washington, D.C. Austin’s monograph is less a comprehensive history of black Washington in the 1920s and 1930s than a critical analysis of the everyday lives of children and the burdens of archival absence. Since the historiography of black Washington has deepened considerably in the past ten years, Austin’s work opens new avenues for exploring the complex lives of African Americans in the nation’s capital.
Austin was deliberate in selecting her subject material. Eschewing a focus on grand narratives of racial progress or civil-rights victories, she instead chose to explore the lives of working-class black children who lived in southwest Washington and would have been lost entirely to history, if not for Howard University and its cadre of black social scientists, who used the nation’s capital as a laboratory to investigate their...