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Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890-1920 MARK R. SCHNEIDER, 1997 Boston, Northeastern University Press pp. xv+ 262; $21.95 (paperback)
Mark Schneider asks much of his readers-mainly that they know some African American history into which they can fit his Boston Confronts Jim Crow. "The special role of Bostonians in the country as a whole should become obvious," he writes with misplaced confidence (ix). He offers up a lineup of "representative types," yet who are meant not to be freestanding but rather actors in a narrative or "the work of leaders who left a paper trail" (xi). This strategy he attributes to the influence of Arthur Mann's Yankee Reformers in an Urban Age.
The result is a thoroughly researched book that successfully struggles against one of the main bugbears of historians of the African American experience: black newspapers that have "virtually disappeared" or are "available only in random numbers" and "manuscript collections [that] scarcely exist," as against white documentation of...