Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era: A Cultural History

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. (Feb.)