Dancing Down the Barricades

Starred review from February 1, 2023

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

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 13, 2023
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.