The Strange Career of Jim Crow

C. Vann Woodward's "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" remains one of the most important books written about post-Reconstruction Southern America. In the space of very few pages, Woodward brings to us the proposal that the assumptions we have all been making about Jim Crow laws and the development of segregation were all wrong from the very beginning. We are taught the lie from grade school forward that "that's just the way it always has been in the South." Not so, according to Woodward.We learn very quickly when reading this book that not only were there three or four decades following the Civil War wherein there was virtually no major segregation in the South - but the conditions with regards to segregation and equal rights in the South were actually better than in the North for several decades as well.The lies of a racist South and a desperate North (desperate to make a moral issue of something that they too were guilty of in trying to keep blacks from having equal rights) somehow stuck in the Southern psyche, and all along we've been thinking that people were racist because "that's all they knew." Woodward blows this theory out of the water, and exposes the truth about the post-Reconstruction South.Not only was segregation not popular in the South in much of the late 19th Century, but blacks voted often. There was very good participation - enough to put a lot of blacks and Republicans in public office in the South - for a time. It was not until the 1870s that a gradual change began in the South. That change brought about the Jim Crow laws - changes that were unwelcome to all of humanity. Booker T. Washington believed that the South could not advance and still leave the blacks behind: Woodward came about a few decades later and showed us all just how right Washington really was.

C. Vann Woodward's "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" was the first major effort to analyze the segregation system in the American South. Appearing in 1955, the author's treatment of this institution refuted contemporary statements made by several public figures who argued that racial separation was an ancient phenomenon that would last indefinitely. Not so, argued Woodward, as he proceeded to prove that the South experienced a time after the Civil War when the two races often intermingled without widespread hostility on the part of southern whites. Woodward's book expresses the heartfelt belief that since segregation was a recent development, the possibility existed for the South to reject its separatist doctrine and eventually embrace integrationist principles. The first chapters deal with the period during and after Reconstruction, what Woodward refers to as the First Reconstruction, when the South grudgingly accepted conditions forced upon it by the North. The author argues that blacks in southern urban areas often lived side by side with white citizens, as well as rode in the same streetcars and dined in many of the same restaurants. There were exceptions to these incidents, but overall monolithic, legalized segregation measures simply did not exist. One of the reasons for this lack of overarching segregation policies concerned southern politics in the post-Civil War South. The author outlines three political philosophies during the 1880s and 1890s that worked to capitalize upon black support. Southern liberalism went nowhere with its arguments that all citizens must have equal rights in all social spheres. Conservative southerners took a position between liberals and radical racists, arguing that in every society there existed superior and inferior elements. Obviously, conservatives claimed, blacks occupied an inferior position to whites. This did not mean that blacks should be treated harshly or denied privileges. The conservatives were paternalists and used the goodwill they earned from blacks to capture elective offices from the Redeemers. The conservative political philosophy collapsed when widespread corruption swept its proponents from office. The Populists, the last southern political structure Woodward discusses, also attempted an alliance with blacks. The movement was short lived, and with external pressures of the 1880s and 1890s such as economic depression and northern indifference to blacks, southerners blamed blacks for their social ills. Moreover, southern politicians weary of the years of malicious infighting decided to seek a measure of unification, and they achieved this fusion by blaming black voters for economic and political discord. It is at this time, writes the author, when segregation laws blossomed across the South. The second section of the book deals with the emergence and consequences of what Woodward calls the Second Reconstruction. Starting during the Second World War and emerging fully during the 1950s and 1960s

C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow is not only a fine introduction to its topic -- the segregationist period in the South -- but one of the most significant and influential books of its time. Originally published in 1955 (by Oxford University Press), Professor Woodward's tome kicked off the Civil Rights era with a bang, debunking the ludicrous myth (and mantra among segregationists) that separation of the races had always existed in Southern life, and generally dissecting an ugly monstrosity which had come to be accepted simply as "the way things are." Ten years later, in a second revision which came just as the legal battle against segregation was almost won, Woodward added a wealth of information which helped finish the job of winning the people's hearts and minds: in the words of Robert Penn Warren, Woodward's work was "a witty, learned, and unsettling book. The depth of the unsettling becomes more obvious day by day; which is a way of saying that it is a book of permanent significance." And ten years later still, in this -- the third and final revision -- Woodward capped off the era with an examination of the more violent, less integrationist movements which arose after Watts, with leaders like Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale.Woodward is an equal-opportunity myth-exploder. On the one hand, he demonstrates at great length that segregation was not a mere expression of racism, but in fact a complex and corrupt outworking of many political and economic interests in the impoverished, post-Reconstruction South. On the other hand, he also shows conclusively that segregation took time to develop: it was not, as its supporters claimed, the way things had always been, or even the way things had come to be immediately following the war, but had actually arisen thirty and even forty years later, with the removal of Northern troops, the disintegration of Republican influence, a national "taking up of the white man's burden" with regard to "colored" peoples abroad, and increasing economic distress which allowed successive Populists and Democrats to consolidate power by limiting white exposure to the threat of competing (and competitive) blacks. These things, combined with a series of Supreme Court rulings sanctioning segregation, produced a wicked stew which more modern readers found extremely unpalatable upon Woodward's closer examination.Beyond these things, Woodward's treatment of the Jim Crow era itself, as well its demise, were and are excellent, and were especially provocative at the time of their writing. Based on a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1954, the book is not annotated, and even in a third edition remains quite brief; yet it is thorough and engaging, and suffers only a bit for these points. In all, it remains not only an excellent history -- produced by one of America's finest scholars -- but also a key source document of its era, and is a very good read as well. It con

One of the central problems in American history is that of race relations, and one of the central problems of race relations in America has been that of segregation. Woodward intends for this book to be an overview of the rise and fall of de jure segregation in the American South, and, for the most part, he succeeds admirably. There is much to commend this book and its author for. Woodward debunks the notion, especially popular among the defenders of segregation during the Civil Rights era, that segregation had been part of the Southern way of life for time immemorial; instead, he convincingly argues, a considerable amount of integration existed from before the Civil War up until the turn of the Twentieth Century. He provides a nuanced analysis of the course of white Southern resistance to desegregation decisions by the Supreme Court -- it was not monolithic, nor was it immediately virulent; rather, "massive resistance" developed over the course of several years, not reaching its peak until the early 1960s. Finally, his analysis of the internal tensions in the Civil Rights movement between the integrationists and the nationalists and between the black middle class and the mass of black poor, while frustratingly incomplete, nevertheless rings true.This is a short book, and the author's literary style makes it seem even shorter. His prose is engaging and precise, and this book is a quick read in spite of the depth and importance of the ideas that it contains. The only criticisms that I can offer are fairly minor. Foremost is the lack of citations in the book. This is understandable, especially in light of the fact that the book originated as a series of lectures given at the University of Virginia in 1954. Still, Woodward could have included footnotes if he had wanted to when he was assembling the book for publication. Second is the virtual lack of analysis for why the Jim Crow laws seemed attractive to white Southerners in the first place, especially in light of the absence of a segregationist heritage in the South.Neither of these two comlaints should detract from the book very much. It is a fine introduction to the Jim Crow era, and it ought to be required reading for any serious student of American history.

For the college level U.S. History student or any interested reader with reasonable background, this book is probably the best, most concise and incisive look at race relations in the American South. Woodward explores the economic and political underpinnings of Jim Crow in a manner that does not fit modernist notions of inherent and intractable racism, but rather shows the real life situations which lead to the Jim Crow laws. A must read for any student of the period. A should read for anyone who smugly accepts the conventional wisdom.Post Script 2002: I've delved much, much further into Southern thought and intellectual history in the four years since I first reviewed this book. I no longer think that Jim Crow was or is as transient as Woodward makes him out to be. De Jure segregation is dead, but de facto segregation is more alive than when Strange Career was written. Strange Career served its purpose when it convinced a wavering Supreme Ct. that Jim Crow could be overcome since he was a transitory phenomena. Time has proven that he wasn't. At the time of Strange Career, the Whites had a monopoly on hate. Since Brown v. The Board, Blacks have acquired the right to hate as well.