The Strange Career of Jim Crow
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Product Description
This third revised edition of Woodward’s classic study of the history of the Jim Crow laws and of American race relations in all-purpose 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.
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Concise but scholarly, Professor Woodward’s work is the definitive history of this aspect of the American South. The only criticism this reviewer can throw Prof. Woodward’s way is that he doesn’t really clarify WHY southern whites instituted Jim Crow. Otherwise, this is an outstanding book.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
For the college level U.S. History student or any interested reader with reasonable background, this book is probably the best, most concise and sharp look at race relations in the American South. Woodward explores the economic and political underpinnings of Jim Crow in a manner that does not fit modernist notions of inherent and intractable racism, but rather shows the real life situations which lead to the Jim Crow laws. A must read for any student of the period. A should read for anyone who smugly accepts the conventional wisdom.
Post Speech 2002: I’ve delved much, much further into Southern thought and intellectual history in the four years since I first reviewed this book. I no longer reflect that Jim Crow was or is as transient as Woodward makes him out to be. De Jure segregation is dead, but de facto segregation is more alive than when Weird Career was written. Weird Career served its purpose when it convinced a dithering Supreme Ct. that Jim Crow could be overcome since he was a transitory phenomena. Time has proven that he wasn’t. At the time of Weird Career, the Whites had a monopoly on despise. Since Brown v. The Board, Blacks have bought the right to despise as well.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
I have the 1957 edition of the book, and so can’t comment on the new chapter.
This is a fascinating book which should be read by anyone interested in racial issues, US history, or US politics.
The major surprise to me is Woodward’s description, perfect with many contemporary quotes, of a time in the late 1800’s post-Reconstruction South where African Americans were treated largely equally with regard to public accomodations and voting. Segregation, then, was considered to be a “lower-class white attitude.”
It wasn’t until approximately 1900 that a very segregationist attitude came about in the South, largely as the result of the interplay of Republican, Democratic, and Progressive politics.
This is course gives the lie to assertion through much of the 1900’s that de jure racial segregation was a time-honored part of Southern life, and there was no possible alternative.
Woodward then goes on to clarify the depths to which Jim Crow legislation sank, describing the effect of African American migration within the country, World War II, how our segregationist policies hurt the US image abroad, and on to the beginnings of the civil rights movement, ending before long after _Brown v. Board of Education_, well before the major civil rights events and legislation.
Honestly quick read, and a fantastic book!
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
This book took me by surprise. The first sixty or seventy pages are hard to get through but after getting through them, it is hard to place this book down. I have learned lots of new information regarding Jim Crow laws and many additional segregation-related topics. I certainly recommend this to anyone who has a passion for U.S. history, or history in all-purpose, or enjoys learning about how African American’s lives were changed throughout American history.
Buy it, read it, share it.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
C. Vann Woodward’s “The Weird Career of Jim Crow” remains one of the most vital books written about post-Reconstruction Southern America. In the space of very few pages, Woodward brings to us the proposal that the assumptions we have all been building about Jim Crow laws and the development of segregation were all incorrect from the very beginning. We are taught the lie from grade school forwards that “that’s just the way it permanently has been in the South.” Not so, according to Woodward.
We learn very quickly when reading this book that not only were there three or four decades following the Civil War wherein there was virtually no major segregation in the South – but the conditions with regards to segregation and equal rights in the South were really better than in the North for several decades as well.
The lies of a racist South and a desperate North (desperate to make a moral issue of something that they too were guilty of in trying to keep blacks from having equal rights) somehow stuck in the Southern psyche, and all along we’ve been thinking that people were racist because “that’s all they knew.” Woodward blows this theory out of the water, and exposes the truth about the post-Reconstruction South.
Not only was segregation not well loved in the South in much of the late 19th Century, but blacks voted regularly. There was very excellent participation – enough to place a lot of blacks and Republicans in public office in the South – for a time. It was not until the 1870s that a gradual change started in the South. That change brought about the Jim Crow laws – changes that were unwelcome to all of humanity. Booker T. Washington believed that the South could not advance and still place the blacks behind: Woodward came about a few decades later and showed us all just how right Washington really was.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5