Contemporary Authors

• The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2015

https://lccn.loc.gov/2015002750 Berrey, Stephen A. The Jim Crow routine : everyday performances of race, civil rights, and segregation in Mississippi / Stephen A. Berrey. Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2015] xiii, 331 pages ; 24 cm E185.93.M6 B46 2015 ISBN: 9781469620930 (pbk : alk. paper)

• American Historical Association Web site - http://blog.historians.org/2014/06/aha-member-spotlight-stephen-berrey/

  AHA Member Spotlight: Stephen A. Berrey
  June 11, 2014 Permalink Short URL

  AHA members are involved in all fields of history, with wide-ranging specializations, interests, and areas of employment. To recognize our talented and eclectic membership, AHA Today features a regular AHA Member Spotlight series.

  sberreyStephen A. Berrey is an assistant professor of history and American culture at the University of Michigan. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has been a member since 2006.

  Alma mater/s: PhD, University of Texas; MA, University of Tennessee; BS, University of Missouri

  Fields of interest: African American history, race and culture, the US South, 20th-century US

  When did you first develop an interest in history?

  I remember the precise moment when I became interested in studying history. I was an undergraduate sitting in a course on America in the 1960s and the professor, Robert Collins, was lecturing on post-World War II consumerism. In the middle of it he began reciting John Updike’s poem, “Superman,” which included seemingly 50 references to “super” things, including the supermarket, a train called the “Super Chief,” supercilious men, and “Super-Tone-O for relief.” The professor then proceeded to explain what that poem revealed about the 1950s. In that moment an entire world of history opened up to me. Poetry and silly phrases and the ordinary products of everyday life were historically significant? My whole conception of history shifted, and I was hooked.

  What projects are you working on currently?

  I am at the very end of a book project (tentatively titled The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race and the End of Segregation in Mississippi, University of North Carolina Press) that explores race relations and racial transformations in the post-World War II era. In the book I use the concept of performance to analyze the ways in which African Americans and whites daily played racial roles. I chart those roles into the 1950s and 1960s to consider how racial practices did and didn’t change as segregation came to an end.

  I am also working on a book that examines amateur blackface minstrel shows in schools and churches in the US from the 1930s to the 1970s. I am especially interested in understanding these local enactments within the context of broader national developments related to racial liberalism and the civil rights and Black Power movements.

  Have your interests changed since graduate school? If so, how?

  In graduate school I was profoundly influenced by a number of studies (from Robin D.G. Kelley, Peniel Joseph, Timothy Tyson, Glenda Gilmore, Jane Dailey, and others) that challenged how I thought about black resistance and its relationship to the civil rights and Black Power movements. Those studies fueled my interest in the black freedom struggle and especially in understanding the types of resistance that culminated in the mass mobilizations of the 1960s. Since graduate school, I have steadily gravitated to cultural history and to the nuanced ways in which Americans think about and talk about race in the post-civil rights era.

  Is there an article, book, movie, blog etc. that you could recommend to fellow AHA members?

  Elizabeth Abel, Sign of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (2010). Abel takes a familiar subject that we assume we know well—segregation—and uses visual culture to shed new light on the insidious nature of this racial system. It is an excellent model for considering how race (and for that matter, any social construction) weaves its way into the landscape, often quietly shaping the experiences of everyday life.

  On a somewhat less serious note, I also recommend the British television show Doctor Who. How could any historian not love a clever show about time travel?

  What do you value most about the history profession?

  Historians still appreciate engaging narratives. Even as our roots are in the scientific method of central questions and evidence, the best work in history tells a good story. Indeed those are the stories that drew me to history. More than aesthetic preference, conceiving of history as a form of storytelling also sets us up to capture the complexities, the contradictions, and the messiness of the past.

  Why did you join the AHA?

  I initially joined the AHA for the opportunity to attend the annual meetings and to meet the historians I most respect and admire. Indeed as a graduate student I scanned the program for attendees and each year I contacted several of them. I still look forward to the annual opportunity to connect with fellow historians.

  Do you have a favorite AHA annual meeting anecdote you would like to share?

  No one particular moment stands out but one of the things I most love about the AHA is the opportunity to reconnect with friends who are spread across the country.

  Other than history, what are you passionate about?

  I love to read fiction as a way to disconnect from my professional life, and I am almost obsessive about reading something creative at the end of every day. Among my favorite writers are Haruki Murakami, Toni Morrison, Graham Greene, and Milan Kundera.

• Department of American Culture, University of Michigan Web site - https://lsa.umich.edu/ac/people/faculty/sberrey.html

  Stephen A. Berrey

  Associate Professor and AC Director of Graduate Studies
  sberrey@umich.edu

  Office Information:

  3640 Haven Hall

  Fields of study:
  Race and culture; African American History; U.S. South; 20th-century United States; cultural history

  phone: 734.615.2936

  Education/Degree:

  Ph.D., University of Texas, 2006
  About

  Professor Berrey’s research explores the relationship between racial practices and everyday culture in the twentieth-century U.S. His book, The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi (UNC, 2015), uses the concept of performance to analyze daily racial practices and examine racial transformations in the Jim Crow and civil rights eras in Mississippi. He is currently researching amateur productions of blackface minstrel shows by schools, churches, and civic organizations in the U.S. from the 1920s to the 1970s.

  Berrey teaches courses on African American history and culture and on race and culture in the U.S. South.

  Affiliation(s)

  Faculty: Department of American Culture (AC)
  Faculty: Department of History

  CV: https://lsa.umich.edu/ac/people/faculty/sberrey/_jcr_content/file.res/.pdf

• LOC Authorities -

  LC control no.: n 2015012367

  Descriptive conventions:
  rda

  Personal name heading:
  Berrey, Stephen A.

  Found in: The Jim Crow routine, 2015: ECIP t.p. (Stephen A. Berrey)

  ================================================================================

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
  Library of Congress
  101 Independence Ave., SE
  Washington, DC 20540

  Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov

The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi
Mark Schultz
Journal of Southern History. 82.3 (Aug. 2016): p700.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:

The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi. By Stephen A. Berrey. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [xvi], 331. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2093-0.)

Seen from a distance, Jim Crow seems systematic and static. Seen locally, it seems to shift in ways that are difficult to comprehend both for those who lived it and for the historians who describe it. In his new study, The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi, Stephen A. Berrey lays out a promising framework for considering these problems regionally and nationally. Inspired by Erving Goffman's understanding of "performance," Berrey conceives of the daily experience of Jim Crow as a public performance with an expected script of words, gestures, and actions that was played out in close, intimate interactions before audiences large and small. Ostensibly, the scripts dictated both white and black behavior, while the white narrative justified the southern way for the nation. But Berrey argues that "this racial system continually had to be remade, with seemingly infinite possibilities for mishaps and manipulation" that did not follow the expected routine (p. 9).

Berrey tracks the transformation of the Jim Crow performance between 1930 and 1960. For decades, white Mississippians enforced inequality with distinctively southern strategies: rituals of submission and explosions of violence within an intimate hierarchy, defended by a rhetoric of nostalgic, harmonious paternalism. After World War II, African American Mississippians directly confronted Jim Crow rules with nonviolent protest. Their performance--in contrast to vicious white assaults--won traction with a national audience, including the federal government. In response, white supremacist leaders altered their own narrative by hiding their racist intent under new legal codes draped in neutral language about preserving the peace. They expanded state power, systematized state surveillance, and sought to replace private white violence with veiled state violence. And they supported this new regime with a carefully professionalized rhetoric of black criminality. Berrey lays out these overarching arguments convincingly and lucidly, with strong original research on the key points.

Perhaps inevitably, as such an ambitious interpretive project, The Jim Crow Routine has some gaps and unresolved tensions. The performance of the rural Jim Crow routine was even more complex, fluid, and ambiguous than Berrey depicts. In general, white southerners allowed much greater license for breaking from "the script" to select individuals than they did for any mass action that might pose a broad challenge to white supremacy, a policy that dovetailed with their rhetoric of paternalism. At the same time, as whites claimed the prerogative to personally define and enforce the rules of the routine, interracial exchanges could be fraught with uncertainty and danger. Had Berrey moved farther into the countryside, beyond more conventionally segregated public spaces like stores, train stations, and movie theaters, he would have found a wealth of additional stories to enrich and confirm his thesis. Additionally, although Berrey recognizes meaningful sectional variations within Mississippi, he does not follow through with this insight. Finally, although his thesis revolves around the flexibility of the Jim Crow routine, he draws heavily from Leon F. Litwack's interpretation of Jim Crow, which tugs Berrey toward a more systematic and inflexible emphasis. More scholarship is needed to sort out these difficulties.

In summary, Berrey has made an important contribution in tracking the seismic shift from the discourse of accommodation to that of confrontation. His careful attention to the multiple meanings of performance and audience provides scholars with a wide and valuable frame with which to rethink the many twists and turns of strategy, action, and narrative that marked the long civil rights movement.

MARK SCHULTZ

Lewis University

Schultz, Mark
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Schultz, Mark. "The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 3, 2016, p. 700+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460447793&it=r&asid=11d0f4d96d4607408161d8343fe06d52. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A460447793
Berrey, Stephen A.: The Jim Crow routine: everyday performances of race and the end of segregation in Mississippi
J.R. Wendland
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 53.2 (Oct. 2015): p306.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:

Berrey, Stephen A. The Jim Crow routine: everyday performances of race and the end of segregation in Mississippi. North Carolina, 2015. 331 p bibl Index afp ISBN 9781469620930 pbk, $29.95

53-0930

E185

MARC

In this unique study of the dialectics of individual agency and social systems, Berrey (American culture and history, Michigan) details how Jim Crow created performative expectations for both white and black people. Centered on Mississippi in the mid-20th century, the author examines the quotidian interracial interactions in and on public and private spaces such as elevators, sidewalks, stores, homes, and buses. Performances in these situations were defined by a violent system that supported white supremacy by demanding subservience and obeisance from black citizens. In addition to this dimension of the system, Berrey looks at how local and national media described this experience as a type of performance of contested narratives of power in the era of Jim Crow. The shift in white dominance through organs of Klan violence to bureaucratized state interventions reflected the ruling class desire to maintain racial class hegemony as national media depictions of southern violence subverted themes of white patronage. Intense white violence in Mississippi shaped the strategies of resistance by African American-led movement actors as white supremacy was depicted as violent, criminal, and immoral. In the end, black resistance altered the public, political, and educational spaces of racial interaction. Summing Up: ** Recommended. All academic levels/libraries.--J. R. Wendland, Grand Valley State University

Wendland, J.R.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wendland, J.R. "Berrey, Stephen A.: The Jim Crow routine: everyday performances of race and the end of segregation in Mississippi." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2015, p. 306. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA431198517&it=r&asid=20258a6135ef190813a849eb8fa3c39a. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A431198517

Schultz, Mark. "The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi." Journal of Southern History, vol. 82, no. 3, 2016, p. 700+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA460447793&asid=11d0f4d96d4607408161d8343fe06d52. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017. Wendland, J.R. "Berrey, Stephen A.: The Jim Crow routine: everyday performances of race and the end of segregation in Mississippi." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Oct. 2015, p. 306. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA431198517&asid=20258a6135ef190813a849eb8fa3c39a. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017.

• H-Net Reviews
  https://networks.h-net.org/node/2295/reviews/119653/godshalk-berrey-jim-crow-routine-everyday-performances-race-civil
  Word count: 2119

  Godshalk on Berrey, 'The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi'
  Author:
  Stephen A. Berrey
  Reviewer:
  David F. Godshalk

  Stephen A. Berrey. The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 331 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-2093-0.

  Reviewed by David F. Godshalk (Shippensburg University)
  Published on H-SAWH (April, 2016)
  Commissioned by Lisa A. Francavilla

  Stephen A. Berrey’s brilliant new book dramatically enriches our understandings of the twentieth-century South, the postbellum history of Mississippi, and the evolution of the black freedom struggle.

  Berrey defines the “Jim Crow routine” as the evolving performative and narrative practices that shaped how race was experienced and interpreted by blacks and whites in Mississippi and America at large. He masterfully documents the ingenuity and bravery with which African Americans challenged segregation from the 1930s into the early 1960s, even as they confronted “the localized, informal, and yet seemingly ever-present surveillance of a white audience,” committed to maintaining Jim Crow (p. 103). Berrey’s analysis of the battles of black Mississippians “to redefine racialized spaces and even to redraw boundaries” provides new insights into the transition from the relatively “accommodative [public] demeanor” that Neil R. McMillen has identified among black Mississippians during the 1920s to the more confrontational civil rights activism that emerged following World War II (p. 51).[1] Berrey makes a second major contribution to our understanding of the long civil rights movement by tracing the growing shift of Mississippi’s white powerbrokers away from the blatant race-baiting and horrific acts of public violence that had allowed civil rights protestors to claim the moral high ground. Increasingly during the 1950s, powerful white supremacists used statewide surveillance networks and the criminal justice system to replace less formal and less disciplined local mechanisms for racial control. At the same time, the proponents of Jim Crow recast their arguments against racial equality in a law and order discourse that played upon longstanding American fears of black criminality. The effectiveness of this Mississippi strategy anticipated the growing national role that the “criminalization and mass incarceration” of African Americans continues to play in perpetuating “racial violence and racial inequalities” (p. 18).

  The Jim Crow Routine’s breathtakingly original and engaging first chapter offers an unrivaled introduction for scholars and students on how segregation was experienced daily in the South. By the 1930s, Jim Crow laws and conventions had matured into a “routine,” specifying “how blacks and whites were expected to interact” in a myriad of public spaces in which they were generally “close enough to see, hear, and touch each other” (pp. 2, 4). Meticulously mapping out the intricate social geographies of southern cities and towns, Berrey demonstrates that the strict separation of the races was limited primarily to schools and churches. Whites generally allowed African Americans into their houses only as domestic workers and laborers and required those interlopers to follow elaborate rules and customs inscribing white dominance and black servility. Faced with practical considerations, such as expense and convenience, businesses and governmental entities established racial boundaries through a dizzying array of physical markers, including dual entrances, stools, ropes, curtains, and balconies. Other sites had shifting boundaries. Using moveable curtains or signs to divide passengers, bus drivers steered whites toward the front of public buses and African Americans toward the rear. Additional locations, such as sidewalks and stores, dispensed with visible racial barriers altogether.

  Berrey’s close attention to the complexities of Jim Crow sensitizes readers to the psychological pressures and physical threats that constantly confronted African Americans in the public spaces that they traversed and in the private homes where they labored. Underlying segregation was the expectation that African Americans visibly display a sense of submissiveness and avoid any gestures or actions that might suggest an air of equality or superiority in relation to whites. To avoid verbal and physical attacks by law enforcement officials and everyday white citizens, African Americans were constantly forced to think on their feet by searching out accommodative moves that might prevent confrontations and by often adopting, in the words of literature critic and scholar Hortense Spillers, “a powerful stillness” that allowed individuals and groups to adapt their behaviors after whites made the first move (p. 35). Longstanding customs gave whites the privilege of moving to the front of lines, racializing time itself. In white homes and isolated public spaces, black women often faced the threat of sexual harassment and violence. In the words and title of an old blues standard, to live Jim Crow as an African American was truly to suffer from “trouble in mind.”[2]

  Despite the persistent threat of white retaliation and the omnipresence of networks of white surveillance, African Americans continuously uncovered opportunities for challenging and undermining the dominant racial routines that Jim Crow mandated. During the early 1900s, African Americans organized boycotts and demonstrations to protest the passage of new segregation laws. As white racial violence escalated and Jim Crow matured, African Americans developed more furtive strategies for dodging the indignities of segregation. Before escaping to Chicago, for example, Richard Wright forged letters, purportedly authored by whites, and acted as “unbookish as possible” to check out reading materials from a “whites-only” library (p. 1). Other African Americans silently shunned businesses that notoriously mistreated blacks. And they avoided the shame of entering houses through back doors by conducting business affairs with whites only in outdoor areas. The influx of uniformed black soldiers into the state during World War II encouraged more direct racial confrontations in buses and a myriad of other segregated spaces. Bringing America’s war against fascism to the South, servicemen repeatedly disrupted the Jim Crow routine by refusing to step aside on sidewalks, by openly talking back to whites, and by directly disobeying bus drivers. The interplay of black challenges to Jim Crow and white counteractions held the continual potential for revising, unmaking, or reinforcing local routines.

  Following the brutal killing of Emmett Till and the notoriously unjust exoneration of his murderers in 1955, Mississippi leaders increasingly sought new strategies for preserving Jim Crow, as both civil rights activists and the national media created a “narrative about the South as a violent, racist place, out of step with the nation and in need of federal intervention” (p. 105). In hopes of preserving white supremacy and shoring up their state’s image, prominent Mississippians increasingly sought to replace the highly localized contrivances that had traditionally regulated African Americans with a statewide surveillance network of law enforcement officers, civic leaders, and public officials, whose efforts were coordinated by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and the Citizens’ Council. At its height, the Citizens’ Council alone attracted as many as eighty thousand members. This more formalized and centralized apparatus allowed state and local leaders to gather and share incriminating information on civil rights activists and African Americans in general that could lead to a number of reprisals, including their dismissal from work, their being beaten or lynched, and their prosecution in court.

  Public officials also sought to centralize the authority of the state to shore up and discipline white supremacy. J. P. Coleman, as governor between 1956 and 1960, substantially increased the size and investigative scope of the state highway patrol and oversaw the passage of laws aimed at curbing the discretionary power of local law enforcement officials. By systemizing and disciplining the informal and scattershot racial policing efforts of local communities, state leaders hoped to establish more effective strategies for preventing civil rights progress while discouraging open conflict and “concealing images of violence from public view, including the kinds of vigilante violence” that mobilized national sympathy for civil rights activists and encouraged the intervention of federal officials into local affairs (p. 106).

  As the 1950s progressed, state lawmakers and public officeholders increasingly abandoned overt references to race and “segregation,” adopting instead a coded language, allowing government leaders and law enforcement officials to expand their abilities to police African Americans and preserve traditional racial boundaries in pursuit of the ostensibly race-neutral goal of promoting law and order. Throughout the 1960s, “breach of the peace,” the definition of which was repeatedly broadened as protests in the state accelerated, was the most common charge made against jailed civil rights workers, closely followed by disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Law enforcement officials also jailed protestors on charges of “littering,” “trespassing,” “contributing to the delinquency of minors,” and “disturbing public worship” (p. 164). On rural roads, away from newspaper reporters and television cameras, law officers routinely arrested activists on almost every imaginable criminal charge. During a five-month period in 1964, for example, Peter Stoner, a student at the University of Chicago and a white volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was arrested on four separate occasions, beaten three times in jail, and charged with at least thirteen crimes, including “using profanity,” “improper passing,” “parking illegally,” and “interfering with an officer” (pp. 169-170). Berrey notes, “for Stoner and for others in Mississippi during the movement, the reliance on arrests was part of a larger effort to move the processes of racial policing from local citizens and vigilantes to official agents of the state. Controlled and hidden from view, acts of racial violence could continue to serve as warnings to others, just as lynchings had done” (pp. 170-171). By obscuring their violent attacks against civil rights activists behind prison and jail walls, state officials generally evaded the censure that they might have faced had images of their violence been displayed on televisions or recounted in news articles. Arrests on trumped-up criminal charges also had the potential of discrediting civil rights workers. Finally, public officials and their segregationist allies repeatedly attempted to stigmatize activists as Communists or homosexuals.

  Paralleling state officials’ growing reliance on the criminal justice system to police racial hierarchies was a shift in prominent segregationists’ rhetoric away from the openly racist terminology and excessively emotional rhetoric that had characterized Massive Resistance. Narratives of race had long played a central role in supporting Jim Crow in Mississippi and throughout the South. Planters and wealthy whites had elevated themselves as “masters” over a population that they claimed was composed not only of a majority of “faithful” and “subservient” African Americans in need of white guidance but also of a smaller number of allegedly savage black criminals and rapists who could be controlled only by more violent means. Prior to the 1950s, prominent advocates of racial inequality had often marshaled a strident and highly racialized rhetoric to defend Jim Crow. As the 1950s progressed, local journalists and spokesmen increasingly defended their state’s racial traditions with statistical evidence and logical formulations that feigned impartiality, while warning that integration and racial equality would threaten the unique social harmony that set the South apart from the rest of the country. Citing allegedly unimpeachable data culled from the experiences of northern cities and African countries, Mississippi’s spokespeople warned that integration would inevitably encourage the spread of Communism across the South and trigger dramatic increases in the incidence of venereal disease, crime, interracial sex, and teenage pregnancy. As Berrey concludes, the strategies and rhetoric pioneered in Mississippi, emphasizing the seemingly racially neutral terminology of “law and order,” in turn “pointed to how racism and white privilege would survive Jim Crow and influence everyday racial performances, not only in the South but throughout the nation” as well (p. 217). Indeed, as the 1960s progressed, officials across America increasingly embraced the law enforcement and surveillance tactics pioneered by Mississippians to intimidate protestors and jail them on criminal and riot charges.

  Clearly and engagingly written, the Jim Crow Routine deserves a broad audience and will prove an engaging and thought-provoking resource for scholars as well as undergraduate and graduate students. It offers new lenses through which to analyze the Jim Crow South and the broader national racial transformations that have taken place since the 1950s. As is the case with all highly original monographs, its historiographical significance lies as much in the new questions and approaches that it opens up for future scholars as in the definitive answers that it offers. In analyzing the racial routines that shaped Mississippi prior to the 1960s, Berrey expertly traces the innumerable ways in which African Americans negotiated, contested, and redrew the practices of segregation and the dominant narratives of race that whites constructed in its defense. We can only hope that Berrey himself—or a historical and cultural critic who shares his prodigious talents—will more fully examine the counternarratives and improvisational strategies marshaled by the opponents of the new order of racial control that ultimately replaced Jim Crow.

Word Count