Dancing Down the Barricades - by Matthew Frye Jacobson

About the Book

"Through the lens of Sammy Davis Jr.'s six-decade career in show business-from vaudeville to Vegas to Broadway, Hollywood, and network TV-Dancing Down the Barricades examines the workings of race in American culture. The title phrase holds two contradictory meanings regarding Davis's cultural politics: did he dance the barricades down, as he liked to think, or did he simply dance down them, as his more radical critics would have it? Sammy Davis Jr. was at once a pioneering, barrier-busting, anti-Jim Crow activist and someone who was widely associated with accommodationism and wannabe whiteness. Historian Matthew Jacobson attends to both threads, analyzing how industry norms, productions, scripts, roles, and audience expectations and responses were all framed by race, against a backdrop of a changing America. In the spirit of better understanding Davis's life and career, Dancing Down the Barricades examines the complexities of his constraints, freedoms, and choices for what they reveal about Black history and American political culture"--

Book Synopsis

A deep dive into racial politics, Hollywood, and Black cultural struggles for liberation as reflected in the extraordinary life and times of Sammy Davis Jr.

Through the lens of Sammy Davis Jr.'s six-decade career in show business--from vaudeville to Vegas to Broadway, Hollywood, and network TV--Dancing Down the Barricades examines the workings of race in American culture. The title phrase holds two contradictory meanings regarding Davis's cultural politics: Did he dance the barricades down, as he liked to think, or did he simply dance down them, as his more radical critics would have it?

Davis was at once a pioneering, barrier-busting, anti-Jim Crow activist and someone who was widely associated with accommodationism and wannabe whiteness. Historian Matthew Frye Jacobson attends to both threads, analyzing how industry norms, productions, scripts, roles, and audience expectations and responses were all framed by race against the backdrop of a changing America. In the spirit of better understanding Davis's life and career, Dancing Down the Barricades examines the complexities of his constraints, freedoms, and choices for what they reveal about Black history and American political culture.

From the Back Cover

"Dancing Down the Barricades reintroduces readers to Sammy Davis Jr., showing how he fashioned his world-renowned star performances in dance, music, stage drama, film, and television within complex and painfully exclusionary racially defined circumstances not of his own making. Matthew Frye Jacobson brilliantly illuminates the shape-shifting meanings of Davis's multiple performance strategies over the course of the 'long civil rights era, ' from the desegregation 1940s to the Black Power 1970s. Davis deployed his extraordinary talents as a weapon, in tandem with his contradictory public stances--from 'donating' celebrity support to Martin Luther King Jr.'s hard-fought campaigns to standing with Richard Nixon at the 1972 Republican National Convention. This is twentieth-century cultural history of the highest order."--Judith E. Smith, author of Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical

"With Dancing Down the Barricades, Jacobson, one of our most astute historians, provides an extraordinary interpretation of the life and career of Sammy Davis Jr. In this extensive meditation on the cultural politics of the entertainment industry, Jacobson demonstrates how Davis's unparalleled talent and rise to stardom provide a lens through which to better understand twentieth-century American liberalism and its troubling relationship with race and racism. Jacobson's laser-sharp analysis yields new insight into the life of this complicated and compelling artist and public figure; in so doing, he makes Davis relevant to a whole new generation and some of the most urgent social and political challenges they face."--Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

"Dancing Down the Barricades sheds new light on one of the most iconic twentieth-century American entertainers. Who but Jacobson could so adroitly and elegantly frame Sammy Davis Jr. within the 'contending forces' of American history while using this history to surface Davis's own human complexities? As Jacobson shows, we still have much to learn from Davis's redoubtable and confounding brilliance."--Gayle Wald, author of It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television

"A rigorous, original, and bracing look at the complexities of Sammy Davis Jr.'s life and career. While Davis's legacy has often been maligned and misunderstood, Jacobson offers clear-eyed insights and correctives that reposition Davis as a key figure for understanding the racial fault lines and foundations of the US entertainment industry."--Josh Kun, author of The Autograph Book of L.A.: Improvements on the Page of the City

"Dancing Down the Barricades is a virtuoso performance: a gimlet-eyed, wide-angled history of race, celebrity, and politics by one of the most talented historians of our day, focusing on one of the most enigmatic stars of stage and screen, on Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and on the tumultuous postwar era. This is the kind of big-hearted, ambitious history we should all be writing--and reading."--Matthew Pratt Guterl, author of Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe

"Jacobson has taken a deep dive into the life and work, dreams and demons of the enigmatic Sammy Davis Jr. and surfaces with a political history of race and popular culture for our time. By following Davis from the brightest stages to the darkest places, Dancing Down the Barricades shifts the underbelly of American culture from sideshow to center stage, casting new light on its dancing, smiling star. Turns out Mr. Show Business was the spoonful of sugar who helped ground glass go down, but he went down too. Superb."--Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

Review Quotes

"Jacobson's book is a cultural history rather than a biography...He reads Davis's career as a series of texts, including vaudeville routines as part of the Will Mastin Trio, nightclub appearances as a solo act and with the Rat Pack, select film and television appearances, recordings, and key writings and interviews."-- "California History"

"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. . . . 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."-- "Choice Reviews"

"Within Jacobson's rich and layered description of the civil rights movement and post-civil rights era, he gives us a detailed and compassionate portrait of Davis; we understand his passion for the civil rights movement as well as why he was called a sellout and ostracized within his Black community. . . . It's a testament to Jacobson's sensitivity in writing about Davis that he closes Dancing Down the Barricades without reaching a conclusion about Davis' authenticity."-- "NewCityLit"

"Jacobson's own writing style is scholarly yet accessible, not bogged down with too many critical theory buzzwords . . . Particularly dynamic are Jacobson's discussions of the racial hostilities that Davis and other Black entertainers faced off-stage in Las Vegas."-- "The Daily Beast"

"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. . . . Nuanced, incisive, and frequently surprising, this is a worthy reconsideration of a divisive public figure."
-- "Publishers Weekly"

"Davis was caught between warring views of what it meant to be Black in a racist U.S. Jacobson is one of the subtlest commentators on what it means to be caught in such a cultural bind. . . . 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."-- "Library Journal, starred review"

About the Author

Author of seven books on race and US political culture, Matthew Frye Jacobson is Sterling Professor of American Studies and History at Yale University.