Dancing down the barricades Sammy Davis Jr. and the long civil rights era : a cultural history

Jacobson (American studies and history, Yale) explores the terms of assimilation and resistance by celebrity entertainer Davis (1925--1990) from the 1940s to the 1980s. Not exactly a biography, this subtle, expansive study is a scaffold for a searing assessment of white racism that forced African American entertainers into hard spaces during the long civil rights era. The biographical details Jacobson includes demonstrate that Davis endured racism at every turn--from his childhood in vaudeville through his military service and performances on Broadway and in Hollywood; his work in Vegas and on television; his public interracial relationships; his celebratory autobiography Yes I Can (1965); and his work directly aligned with the Civil Rights Movement. Paying careful attention to the aesthetic and political structures surrounding popular entertainment, Jacobson portrays Davis as caught amid difficult forces, struggling to survive at the whims of white producers and of the Rat Pack, whose "good-natured hijinks suggested ... the extent to which racism was so deeply rooted as to inflect the very logic of American culture, including--and perhaps especially--American liberalism" (p. 119). Davis, who interacted personally with Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon, emerges as a complex cultural worker whose outstanding artistry allowed him access to worlds that modeled "self-emancipation" from strictures of white racism. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals; general readers. --Thomas F. DeFrantz, Northwestern University

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.)

With Sinatra's Rat Pack, Sammy Davis Jr. could claim that, by talent alone, he'd raised himself to inclusion in the great American melting pot. Throughout his career, he headlined in Las Vegas, integrated venues, and appeared on many television shows. But a younger Black generation wanted recognition for their differences; to them, Davis was a sellout. Yet in the '60s, Martin Luther King Jr. relied on Davis's star power for fundraisers, with Davis eventually traveling to the South to protest in person. Still, this book shows that Davis was caught between warring views of what it meant to be Black in a racist U.S. Jacobson (history, Yale Univ.; The Historian's Eye) is one of the subtlest commentators on what it means to be caught in such a cultural bind. VERDICT A subtle, insightful book likely to be on many readers' radar for its nuanced look at the consequences of a racial divide with roots that, as Jacobson makes clear, are longstanding, systemic, and institutional.--David Keymer