C. Vann Woodward
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By: Oxford University Press, USA
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9
Average rating: 5.0 of 5
Segregation: What It Was and What It Wasn't 5 out of 5 stars.
38 of 40 people found this review helpful.
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 continues to be vital to a proper understanding of the South, as well as the whole misbegotten concept of "separate but equal."
Editorial Review:
This third revised edition of Woodward's classic study of the history of the Jim Crow laws and of American race relations in general includes a new chapter on the tragic events that have occurred since 1965, including the Watts riots, the murder of Martin Luther King, white backlash encouraged by black activism, and the shift in national mood resulting from the election of Richard Nixon into the White House.
