In his richly detailed book “Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Right Era, A Cultural History,” Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that because Davis personalized racism, he believed that the fight to end it should be done by targeting the individual racists who caused Black people pain. He was an assimilationist who struggled to see racism as systemic until the civil rights era, and even though he raised money for the cause, sang for the cause, and participated in protests, including the famous March on Washington (1963) and the Selma to Montgomery march (1965), he endorsed Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign. This was something that he later regretted, not only because Nixon reneged on promises to Davis of desegregation, but because it had made him a pariah in his Black community.
Jacobson writes of the racism and segregation in the white entertainment world, first in white minstrel shows and then vaudeville, Hollywood and television. Davis participated in his father and godfather’s vaudeville act by tap dancing onstage at the age of three and had his first movie role, playing Rufus Jones in the musical-comedy short “Rufus Jones for President” (1933), when he was seven. Protected from racist insults and threats by his father and godfather, it wasn’t until he joined the military that he experienced brutal beatings and abuse from white soldiers in his unit. Davis eventually began performing for these soldiers, and Jacobson points out that because they enjoyed his singing, impersonations and dancing, Davis became convinced that his talent was more powerful than racism; he believed that he could dance down the barricades as an entertainer.
After his two years at a Wyoming base camp, Davis rejoined his father and godfather in their act and went on to become the main attraction of the Will Mastin Trio. Individual success followed; Davis sang at Ciro’s nightclub in Los Angeles and entered white space in a more public way the moment that Eddie Cantor on the “Colgate Comedy Hour” wiped away sweat from Davis’ brow and then put his arm around Davis calling him “the greatest hunk of talent” he’d ever seen. White-on-Black touching meant immediate threats from the white segregationist community but also reinforced Davis’ belief that he was breaking barricades by being accepted by leading white entertainers.
Jacobson shows that Davis’ participation in the civil rights movement was not self-motivated; however, Davis’ support of Nixon’s reelection campaign does seem to be naïve and ego-driven. He accepts Nixon’s praise while ignoring that Nixon is treating him like a commodity by saying that “You can buy Davis with your actions.” Nixon asks Davis to spend the night at the White House and this makes Davis the first Black man to sleep in Lincoln’s bedroom. A race barricade is broken, and Davis takes pride in this, but this was a personal barricade, rather than a universal one. A photograph in which he’s captured hugging Nixon added weight to the accusation by many of his Black peers of selling out to the white world in exchange for money and fame. Davis regretted hugging Nixon for the rest of his life. His marriage to the white Swedish actress May Britt, his willingness to be part of the Rat Pack even though that meant being the butt of racist jokes by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, and his conversion to Judaism, made him an easy target during the civil rights era, which focused on Black power, Black beauty, and made the convincing case that white racism is systemic.
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. Davis had a complicated, sometimes tragic life living in an America, where he had to take political stands because he was a famous Black entertainer. The truth is that he’d rather have been known as an entertainer who brought Black and white communities together.
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: It’s “impossible to tell if Davis was really dancing the barricades down, or dancing alongside of them, and to distinguish his political from his personal aspirations across six decades of performance, from the pre- to the post- of Civil Rights history.”
The only thing there’s no ambiguity about is the fact that it cost Davis very much to live in this American world.
Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis Jr. and the Long Civil Rights Era, A Cultural History By Matthew Frye Jacobson University of California Press, 344 pages
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