C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career Of Jim Crow

Throughout the entirety of the book The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward, a respected author on the topic of race, writes about the development of racial tensions and the truths behind them. The first thing Woodward asserts in his book, is the fact that the racially targeting laws, dubbed the Jim Crow laws, did not come right after the end of the Civil War; moreover, the racial tensions and laws started to come into effect in the eighteen-nineties; however, they did not come only because white southerners despised African Americans, but rather, they also came to be because of many factors such as resentment of Northern (anti-slavery) politics. The ideas are complex, yet simple to understand once read, but one may need some prior

I say this because he shows not specific events in his book, but rather plays out events in a way that one can reproduce the event in one’s own mind to truly understand the concept in which Woodward wishes to teach. For example, in the first chapter, Woodward depicts the relationships between a house slave and a master, and a field slave and a master. Both are slaves are slaves, but one, being the house slave, is more likely to be in a better environment, and potentially has a good relationship with his or her master(s). Such a relationship may come with the following activities and benefits: attending church together, living in the house, and not having to labor to the same extent as the slaves out on the fields. All of the aforementioned are details that were given in Woodward’s book to help illustrate a painting if you will. A painting that brings one as a reader to understand what the author is trying to convey to that reader. Woodward’s ability to convey his ideas in such an expressive way without writing a narrative makes the book have character that is lacked in other historical books. In my opinion, Woodward’s book is not only persuasive, but it is objective in a way that it is on the right side of history in a demographic that completely disagreed with Woodward’s views to where if we look back on it, Woodward was correct about almost everything he

Throughout the book, as one reads its contents, one can see that Woodward tackles the ideas such as the fact that the interaction between black and whites, which was very prevalent in the pre-Civil War era because of slavery, could not have been undone overnight. One factor that limited segregation was the fact that the north controlled the south for a period of time to prevent the Southerners from stirring up conflict again. And once the north withdrew itself from southern affairs in the late nineteenth century, the south started to introduce the now infamous Jim Crow laws. The rise of southern populism, and the depression of the eighteen-eighties, both led to racial differences to become more pronounced which made whites resent blacks more than ever. Woodward goes in depth in his book to show his reasoning behind his theories of how segregation came to be, and he later describes and analyzes the demise of segregation towards the end of his book in the newer editions. The book as a whole is a journey from the foundation of segregation to its collapse. The demise of segregation really came into effect once the south’s economy got better, and the United States federal government began to comply with UN laws and regulations in regard to civil rights. The south, however, was not too keen on removing