The Strange Demise of Jim Crow

Here's a little-known story of how a group of determined and resourceful African-American students from Houston's Texas Southern University, with support from an unlikely coalition of black middle class community leaders and the local white power elite, managed to slowly, and--most amazingly, for the times--peacefully chip away at the discriminatory practices of Houston's theaters, lunch counters, and hotels in the early 1960s. Although the students used many of the same tactics as civil rights activists in other Southern states--the sit-in, the picket line, the boycott--the real driving force behind the ultimate unseating of Jim Crow in Houston was the undisguised self-interest and bald pragmatism of the business establishment. It's a tale of powerful good old boys grabbing the reigns (often to the consternation of the idealistic TSU students) and stealthily engineering social change before it engineers them out of economic growth and profit. Although this is a fascinating episode in civil rights history, it's not one that is particularly well told here. Using rather shopworn documentary conventions to tell the story (photos, talking heads, and sundry stock footage), an unexpressive narrator who seems to be reading straight from a script, and a kind of bland, chronological "and then....and then...and then" style, greatly diminishes the considerable drama and emotion behind these events. A marginal recommendation for larger African-American studies collections. Aud: H, C, P. (G. Handman)