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C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow
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by Cora Greer
University of Maine at Machias
Machias, Maine
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| | First Book on the History of Jim Crow Laws
The Strange Career of Jim Crow, the first book to examine the history of Jim Crow laws in the post-Civil War South, grew out of a series of lectures given by C. Vann Woodward at the University of Virginia in 1954. It was his hope that this book, published the year after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. School Board of Topeka, would shed light on how, why, and when the system of institutional segregation emerged in the United States.
Within a short time, Strange Career became a supplemental text in college classrooms across the nation. Fifty years (and several editions) later, the book is still the best short account of post-Civil War race relations that is available in print. Woodward was one of the truly great historians of the last century, and AP U.S. History students should be familiar with his work.
Debunking Contemporary Myths
In 1955 it was assumed by Americans, both in the North and South, that in terms of racial segregation, things had "always been that way." Strange Career, however, shows that:
- Legal segregation originated in the North in the antebellum period.
- African Americans voluntarily left white churches to form their own following the Civil War.
- Segregation of education and the military were in place during Reconstruction.
- As late as 1890, African Americans in the South voted, rode on unsegregated trains, and shared public facilities.
- Legal segregation of the races in all areas, and the denial of the suffrage to African Americans, began in the 1890s and was firmly in place by the end of the Progressive Era.
When the Redeemers brought home rule back to the South in 1877, there was no race to push for segregation; rather, they planned to woo freed slaves to polls as supporters of the Democratic Party. African Americans were certainly not considered equal, but as northern politicians courted the Irish for political gain, so their southern counterparts manipulated the colored vote. As the Republican Party withdrew support for black leaders, Woodward argues, southern Democrats "courted, flattered 'mistered' and honored... their Negro voters."
The obvious allies of African Americans were the equally exploited poor whites, and for a brief time in the 1890s, Populist reformers like Tom Watson sought such an alliance. The initial successes of the Populists with African American voters convinced conservative Democrats there was no alternative to playing the race card. They proclaimed the need for "white supremacy," and in time the radicals acquiesced. Tom Watson, when he was the Populist candidate for president in 1904 and 1908, pledged a party platform endorsing black disenfranchisement.
The saddest, and most powerful, chapter in the book is chapter 3, "Capitulation to Racism," in which Vann Woodward postulates the following thesis:
The South's adoption of extreme racism was due not so much to a conversion, but to a relaxation of the opposition. All the elements of fear, jealousy, proscription, hatred and fanaticism had long been present... it was a general weakening and discrediting of the numerous forces that had hitherto kept them in check.... At the dawn of the new [twentieth] century the wave came in as a swell upon a mounting tide of national sentiment and was very much a part of that sentiment. Had the tide been running the other way, the Southern wave would have broken feebly instead of becoming the wave of the future.
Woodward clearly details how a variety of factors continued to encourage, and buttress, the rigid system of social segregation and political disenfranchisement established in the South and accepted in the North.
From Segregation to Civil Rights
The last two chapters of the original edition catalog the legal battle African Americans waged against de jure segregation, culminating in the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. School Board of Topeka in 1954. The South's initially mild reaction to the decision caused Vann Woodward to end the book on a note of restrained optimism.
In more recent editions of Strange Career, the author addresses the southern backlash to Brown, the civil rights movement, and the black nationalism of the late sixties. "The Declining Years of Jim Crow" trace the civil rights struggle from Brown to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With this legislation legal, Jim Crow was abolished. The euphoria that accompanied these successes, however, like that which accompanied the civil rights victories of the 1860s, was based on invalid assumptions. Emancipation did not end the abuse of African Americans, and the end of Jim Crow did not, as many believed it would, resolve all difficulties faced by African Americans.
This second Reconstruction, like the first, begot a series of unintended consequences that would have a negative impact on the country and African Americans. Angry southern whites deserted the Democrats, first for Wallace and then for Nixon and the Republicans -- a party realignment that is still in place. African Americans would fight over the nature of black identity and the extent to which integration with white America represented a disavowal of black culture. Northern whites, particularly those in working class areas, resisted the Court's attempts to move against de facto segregation as fiercely as had their southern white counterparts. Finally, black nationalists wanted to reject all things associated with white America.
Woodward's Predictions Come True
Vann Woodward ends this final revision (1974) with an accurate forecast of the future:
After the legal end of Jim Crow, the emancipated were expected to shed not only such distinctions as they abhorred but those distinctions they cherished as essential to their identity. They found they were unable to rid themselves fully of the former and unable wholly to abandon the latter. Under these circumstances the promise of integration took on a different aspect. So long as it had been truculently withheld, it had seemed infinitely more desirable than when it was grudgingly proffered at prices that seemed too high. Discontent could therefore continue to take both the form of a demand for integration and a demand for separation. Both demands would likely be heard for a long time, for the means of satisfying neither seemed yet at hand.
Woodward's book was termed "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement" by Martin Luther King Jr., and an excellent argument can be made for having AP or survey-level U.S. history students read it in its entirety (234 pages). If this is not possible, however, good excerpts for classroom use include chapters 2, 3, 5, and 6.
Cora Greer has taught in California, Massachusetts, and Maine -- most recently at the University of Maine at Machias. She has served as Reader and Table Leader at the AP U.S. History Reading; been a consultant in AP U.S. History, Building Success, and Vertical Teams; and won the College Board New England Region's Advanced Placement Recognition Award for Excellence in Teaching.
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