Review: Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era, A Cultural History, by Matthew Frye Jacobson

Book Review| November 01 2023 Review: Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era, A Cultural History, by Matthew Frye Jacobson Matthew Frye Jacobson. Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era, A Cultural History. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. 344 pp. Illustrations. Hardcover $29.95. Benjamin Cawthra Benjamin Cawthra BENJAMIN CAWTHRA is professor of history at California State University, Fullerton. He is the author of Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (2011) and articles on Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and photographer and curator Lee Tanner, and was on-camera consultant for Stanley Nelson’s film Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (2019). He has curated an exhibition on Miles Davis and others featuring the work of photographers Dorothea Lange, William Gottlieb, Herb Snitzer, and Kathy Sloane. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2023) 100 (4): 117–119. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.4.117 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Benjamin Cawthra; Review: Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era, A Cultural History, by Matthew Frye Jacobson. California History 1 November 2023; 100 (4): 117–119. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2023.100.4.117 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search I remember watching Sammy Davis Jr. on television while growing up in the 1970s and early ’80s, most memorably during charity telethons. He routinely showed his entertainer’s instincts for, first, making the song-and-dance look easy and, second, looking exhausted when addressing the cameras after hours of work without sleep. Ease and exhaustion also characterized Davis’s efforts to dance, sing, act, write, and live his own story during the drive for civil rights that crested near the peak of his popularity. Davis could do it all, could make dynamic entertaining look like breathing, but as he did so, he was only a tap step or two removed from the long minstrel tradition from which this child vaudevillian emerged. In Matthew Frye Jacobson’s new book on Davis, we see one of the most famous African Americans of his time struggle and often fail to connect the example of his own talent to... You do not currently have access to this content.