In West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California's Color Line, Lynn M. Hudson explores how blackness and whiteness were constructed and contested in California from its founding as a state through the mid-twentieth century. Hudson shows the simultaneous durability and instability of Jim Crow segregation as she peoples her narrative with Black women and men who contested the color line and refused white supremacy. This history details the ways in which race and citizenship were negotiated through a complex entanglement of public and private spaces, discourses of scientific racism, desires for self-determination, racialized frontier violence, and legal struggle.
Though the West and North have long been seen as an exception to the brutalities of the American South, the color line and Jim Crow in California evince the same racial anxiety and protectiveness over whiteness that animated racial bigotry throughout the country. Hudson plays with the south-as-reference and shows...