This presentation focuses on the book, Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City. Houston Bound shows how, despite the existence of Jim Crow laws that created a black/white racial binary, converging migrations to Houston, Texas—particularly those of Creoles of color, ethnic Mexicans, and Black East Texans—complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness, and introduced different understandings about race between the 1920s and 1960s. Steptoe uses music to examine these racial complexities, tracing the emergence of jazz, rhythm and blues, and zydeco to overlapping migrations that brought new understandings of race and community.
About the Lecturer - Tyina Steptoe is an associate professor of history at the University of Arizona. Her work focuses on race, gender, and popular culture in the United States. Her book, Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City (University of Cali-fornia Press, 2016), has received several awards, including the Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book (North American) from the Urban History Association and the W. Turrentine Jackson Book Prize from the Western History Association. Her other writing has appeared in publications such as the American Quarterly, Journal of African American History, Modern American History, Journal of the West, and the Oxford American.
