Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White

Civil rights historian Sturkey (To Write in the Light of Freedom) turns his eye to the Jim Crow–era South to tell the maddening racial history of Hattiesburg, Miss. Sturkey chooses Hattiesburg because of its role as the quintessential city of the post-Reconstruction New South and its eventual importance to the civil rights movement. The book ranges from the city’s founding in 1882 to the beginning of the Freedom Summer of 1964 and alternates between the perspectives and experiences of black and white Hattiesburgers. This narrative structure makes clear the stark contrast between the parallel but unequal experiences of black residents and white ones under Jim Crow. He lays bare the perpetual fear of unsanctioned violence faced by African-Americans, from casual verbal and physical abuse to lynchings, and discrimination, as in a garment factory that arrived in the city in the late 1930s that hired only whites. Sturkey writes using such scholarly conventions as endnotes, but the complex portrait of the city that emerges is an accessible one. Hattiesburg is not connected in the popular mind with civil rights history in the way of Selma and Montgomery, but Sturkey’s vibrant history makes a strong case that, to understand how the civil rights movement emerged, it’s essential to spend time there. (Mar.)