C. Vann Woodward, who is ninety on 13 November 1998, is the author
of
perhaps the most famous work of history every to have rocked the Southern
United States. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, first presented
as the James W.
Richard lectures at the University of Virginia, appeared in 1955: only
one year
after the Supreme Court's celebrated decision in Brown v. Board
of Education, that
racially segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the
Fourteenth
Amendment because separate facilities were “inherently unequal.”
White
Southern publicists and politicians stormed and raged that racial separation
was
in the order of nature, the segregation laws were from time immemorial,
and that
Chief Justice Warren ought to be impeached; and now came a soft-spoken,
professionally respected historian, himself from Arkansas, to tell them,
and,
worse, to tell the world, that the South's universal segregation or
“Jim Crow”
laws in fact dated at most only from the 1890s – well within the
lifetime of many
who were still expressing their opinions.The controversy was intense and prolonged. And it came to involve less
politically motivated questions of historical interpretation because Woodward
was often taken to have been referring more generally to the substance
of race
relations as well as the segregation laws. He accepted that some of his
formulations required reconsideration, and the book, in constant demand,
went
through several revisions and four editions, the last appearing in 1974.
But the
core of the argument has survived to leave an enduring legacy in Southern
historiography.
