Strange career

MARCH 25, 1965 was a warm, cloudy day in Montgomery, Ala., and though it looked like rain, 25,000 people had gathered in front of the state capitol to listen to Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his closing speech for the Freedom March, which had begun several days and 58 miles before in Selma.

In the crowd was a small band of academics who had come for the end of the march, among them Chicago's John Hope Franklin, Columbia's Richard Hofstadter, and Yale Law School's Louis Pollak. But literally towering above them was Yale historian C. Vann Woodward, a quiet, sartorial Southerner who, 10 years earlier, had written ''The Strange Career of Jim Crow," a book that King himself had once called the ''historical Bible of the civil rights movement."

Woodward argued in the book, published 50 years ago this fall, that uniform, legally codified segregation, far from being an inevitable outgrowth of race relations in the aftermath of the Civil War, as was long assumed, had only emerged during the 1890s--an argument that gave hope to those struggling to overthrow those laws (commonly referred to as ''Jim Crow") through the courts and legislatures. The book, King said in the Montgomery speech, proved that ''however frustrating the hour, it will not be long" before segregation was crushed.

King wasn't the only person to praise ''The Strange Career of Jim Crow." By the time of the march, it had sold tens of thousands of copies, inspired thousands to join the civil rights movement, and was about to be republished in its second revised edition--pretty good for a 183-page scholarly text.

''Not many monographs or books written by professors would have had that impact," said Franklin, now an emeritus professor of history at Duke, in a recent interview.

Woodward's book straddled the worlds of academia and activism--a balancing act that made the history of ''Strange Career" rather strange itself. Before Woodward, segregation was barely mentioned by historians of the South. He changed all that--by showing how legal segregation, as a set of laws enacted at a certain time and under certain circumstances, had a history that couldn't be ignored--and in doing so became the center of intense academic debate himself. At the same time, because ''Strange Career" was written for an academic audience, its nuances and qualifications were lost on many lay readers, who later attacked it for implying that blacks and whites in the South had once enjoyed a ''golden age" of race relations--a charge that Woodward vehemently denied.

But the book survived the decades of controversy, and today, though less relevant to current historiography, younger scholars look to ''Strange Career" as a touchstone for what their field is capable of achieving. Indeed, it was recently recognized by the Modern Library, which listed it among the 100 most important 20th-century nonfiction works in English. As William McFeely, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Georgia, noted in an interview, Woodward ''completely changed the view of what happened to black people after the Civil War." And in doing so, his slim volume helped change race relations in postwar America.

. . .

By 1951, when he was still in his early 40s, Woodward (who died in 1999 at the age of 91) had already written two major books: a biography of the Georgia populist Tom Watson, published in 1938, and ''Origins of the New South" (1951), a landmark history of the region's transformation from 1877 to 1913, which contained the seeds for many of the ideas central to ''Strange Career."

Born in small-town Arkansas in 1908 to middle-class parents, Woodward's early exposure to racism--cross-burnings, Klan parades--instilled within him a lifelong passion for civil rights. While teaching at Johns Hopkins in the late 1940s, he often commuted to Washington, doing research at the Library of Congress for a series of historical briefs supporting Thurgood Marshall's desegregation cases for the NAACP.

Woodward's interest soon coalesced around the origins of Jim Crow. After pouring over newspaper clippings, legislative transcripts, and travelogues, he began to believe that even if segregation was a de facto part of Southern life after the war, it was not established legislatively throughout the South until the 1890s. This meant, he wrote, that there was ''a time of experiment, testing, and uncertainty ... alternatives were still open and real choices had to be made."

As Woodward had already showed in ''Origins of the New South," the end of Reconstruction in 1877 left the South in a state of political and economic flux--and no change was greater than the enfranchisement of freed slaves. It was only with the emergence of the short-lived interracial Populist coalition in the 1890s, against which Southern conservatives resorted to racist fear-mongering to win votes among lower-class whites, that the rise of Jim Crow laws was assured. Blacks were quickly disenfranchised, and by 1900 a bright line of legal segregation had been drawn between black and white life throughout the South.

In 1954 Woodward presented his research as a series of lectures at the University of Virginia. ''When he was done writing, he asked me to read it," recalled Franklin, who was at the time a fellow researcher for Marshall. ''I thought it was spectacular. It undercut the notion that things had always been that way, that there was nothing to do about it. That was a new kind of approach to the problem of the South."

The lectures were published as a book in 1955 by Oxford University Press, yet the volume was little read outside of history departments. But by 1957, when it was released as a trade paperback, the Supreme Court had ruled, in a case for which Woodward had contributed historical briefs, that school desegregation must proceed ''with all deliberate speed," and the Montgomery bus boycott had captured national attention. When the book reappeared, it was a bestseller--an elegantly written, concise explanation of the nation's most pressing social concern.

''The book had an energizing and authenticating effect on the civil rights movement," said Sheldon Hackney, a University of Pennsylvania historian who is writing a biography of Woodward. ''[It] offered legitimacy to the demand to dismantle legal segregation."

''Strange Career" also had an energizing effect among white liberals in the South, many of whom had been skeptical of the movement's chances for success. ''It was just as important to white Southerners" as it was to black civil rights leaders, said Glenda Gilmore, who holds the Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward chair in history at Yale, ''because for many it provided their first clue that Southern white supremacy was an unnatural, undemocratic, and continually contested regime."

. . .

In addition to galvanizing civil rights activists, black and white, the book sparked an immediate and long-lasting debate among historians. ''Some fashioned careers out of Woodward's thesis, either by defending it or attacking it," wrote historian and Woodward biographer John Roper, a professor at Emory & Henry College.

Interestingly, many of Woodward's most strident academic critics came from the left, particularly those who, ironically, agreed with the previous generation of scholars in arguing that segregation was an endemic part of Southern folkways that long predated Jim Crow. North Carolina's Joel Williamson, for example, argued that by focusing strictly on the legal and legislative history of segregation, Woodward had downplayed ''a widespread and fairly rigid pattern of de facto physical segregation of blacks and whites already in place ... by 1868."

Another critic, historian Richard Wade of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, found evidence of both de jure and de facto segregation in antebellum Southern cities--white-only trolley and hotel laws, for example--that he said Woodward had either ignored or overlooked. Other scholars used Wade's findings to argue that Jim Crow was not just a function of political decisions but a symptom of a deeper, more pervasive level of racism, which would require more than mere legislative reform to uproot.

At first, Woodward took the sometimes harsh criticism with characteristic charm, disarming even those wary of a white Southerner with a heavy drawl making the case against Jim Crow. But as he grew older and it became evident that his best academic work was behind him, he slipped into a defensive posture, publicly downplaying the importance of his thesis. It didn't help that by the late 1960s the civil rights movement was under attack from black nationalists, and Woodward's approach was out of step with the radical tenor of the time.

''In the very late 1960s and early 1970s, both the Soul movement and the Black Power movement slammed white liberalism and integrationism," said Roper in a recent interview. ''Woodward was in the middle of what got slammed."

By 1974, when he wrote the preface and final chapters of the book's third and final revised edition, Woodward had entered what one friend termed his ''Tory period," in which he criticized himself for having tried to integrate scholarship and activism. ''He lost for a time any controlling sense of commitment to a social program, and he expressed a sense of distance, almost estrangement, from the energies which surged through 'The Strange Career,"' wrote Roper in his biography. And though he remained an important force in Southern history and liberal politics--and though he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for editing ''Mary Chesnut's Civil War," an annotated edition of a Southern woman's extensive diaries of the Civil War years--''Strange Career" proved to be Woodward's last significant piece of original scholarship.

. . .

Today, scholars are more interested in the social, rather than explicitly political, aspects of Jim Crow, more likely to look at how segregation affected gender and class relations than at explanations for its rise. ''I'm not sure how important the book is for contemporary scholarship," says UW-Madison historian Stephen Kantrowitz. ''The scholarship on Jim Crow has mutated into something quite different."

And yet, if the book no longer appears in footnotes, its stature as a model of engaged historical narrative has only grown. University of South Carolina historian Mark Smith said that before writing his own books on slavery and the South, ''I turned to Woodward less to engage directly with his various arguments but more just to read, revel in, a master's touch. If 'Strange Career"s arguments gradually lose historiographical purchase, at least it'll keep alive an art form I sometimes worry is in danger of evaporating."

One of Woodward's final public statements on the book appeared in a December 1988 journal article. Coming full circle, he reaffirmed both his faith in the fundamental thesis and the power of history to change the present. Even if, as he had come to accept, de jure segregation had existed in many places before 1890, there was still something significant in the sudden onset of uniform, institutionalized racism across the South. Recognizing that fact, he wrote, did more than score a debater's point--''it helped to force an acknowledgement that race relations had a history." For him, making that point, and making it stick, was his proudest achievement.

Clay Risen is an assistant editor at The New Republic.