The strange career of jim crow analysis

C. Vann Woodward.The Strange Career of Jim Crow: A Commemorative Edition. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xvii + 245 pp. $14.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-514690-5.

Reviewed by Michael J. Pfeifer (Faculty Member in American Social History, The Evergreen State College)
Published on H-South (May, 2003)

The Strange Career of Jim Crow, a Half-Century On

The Strange Career of Jim Crow, a Half-Century On

In 1988, historian Howard Rabinowitz assessed the "several careers" of C. Vann Woodward's seminal history of racial segregation in the United States. Writing out of the experience of his own extended scholarly debate with Woodward, Rabinowitz noted that The Strange Career of Jim Crow had evolved from a "lecture series" into an oft-used textbook on American race relations.[1] He evaluated the status of "the Woodward thesis," which posited that racial segregation did not emerge at the time of slavery's demise, but instead after a period of flux and

•

King, Woodward, and The Strange Career of Jim Crow

Racial segregation as a way of life did not komma about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging amerikansk whiskey interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the nation. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor vit masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor vit plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.

Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, so

•

The strange career of jim crow - C. Vann Woodward

Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." The book offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, presenting evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s. Woodward convincingly shows that, even under slavery, the two races had not been divided as they were under the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s. In fact, during Reconstruction, there was considerable economic and political mixing of the races. The segregating of the races was a relative newcomer to the region.
Hailed as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of the twentieth century, The Strange Career of Jim Crow has sold almost a million copies and remains, in the words of David Herbert Donald, "a landmark in