The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. 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.
McClanahan points out that Jim Crow was born in New England. Calls Woodward a Beardian, who supported economic determinism? Avery Craven raised the point as well that . . . "We had this civil war in American history, and the north was right and that's the position we're going to base our arguments off of, and the South was wrong almost all the time and we're going to discount what they're saying. . . ." All that Woodward and Craven are saying is that the South are valuable in this argument and maybe there's some merit to some of the things they said. The history of Tom Watson, an agrarian rebel, is good It's a good book.
Books referenced:
Break It Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America's Imperfect Union, Richard Kreitner, 2020.
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