On “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” by C. Vann Woodward *****

I'd long imagined this book as much longer than it is. It is referenced a lot in literature about the civil rights movement, and it turns out it was originally based off a series of lectures. That means not only short but also accessible, with minimal presentation of references. In this case, it works very well.

What one gets is a very brief account, toward the last third of the book, of the civil rights movement up through the early 1960s. All the major events are there, placed in context, which is wonderful.

But the real joy of this book, for me, was the way that Woodward blows up many of the assumptions that it's easy to have about the way that race relations came to be in the early twentieth century. He notes that actually, during antebellum years, Blacks and Whites in the South were actually quite mixed socially, especially in the city. This was different from how things were in the North, where the races were much more inclined to be socially segregated, even if not by law. This mixing actually amazed Northern visitors.

After the Civil War, this mixing didn't go away. Blacks and Whites were on intimate terms in the South, not in the North. This isn't to say, of course, that there was any sense of equality, just that there was no real impetus to force the different races into different spheres. Reconstruction didn't change this. In fact, in some ways, Reconstruction was almost a success, insofar as Black people were now able to take on political power as well.

So what changed? After the federal interest in forcing the South to treat Black folks as people, the South slowly began to impose laws that reinforced the inferior status of Black people. These laws were those that led to segregation: the Jim Crow laws. They started, in just a few states, with the forced separation of Blacks and Whites on railroad cars. But within a decade, the practice had spread almost entirely across the South, along with other rules in virtually every sphere, such that eventually there were separate places for virtually everything—food, school, water fountains, and so on. Jim Crow segregation, in other words, really didn't come to be “normal” until around 1900. By 1950, when the Supreme Court started ruling against such laws, many folks just felt like Jim Crow was the way things had always been down South.

On “The Last Thing I Heard” by Theron Hopkins (1343 words) *****

Here's a hard-luck story that manages to feel somehow genuine and authentic, the great strength of this piece. It's about a son, and about a dad who takes one too many financial hits. What happens to such a relationship in the years that follow? Read the story here at The Sun.

On “Reading John in Ephesus” by Sjef Van Tilborg***

The concept of this book is an intriguing one. Given that most scholars tend to believe that John's Gospel and letters were written in the city of Ephesus, Van Tilborg sets out to explore what readers in Ephesus would have thought of the works. In that effort, he looks at concepts like kings, gods, temple, and teachers and students, comparing the Christian and Jewish concepts with those that would have been common among residents in Ephesus. To make such comparison, Van Tilborg examines more than anything else the epigraphs that reside among the city's surviving architecture.

The results, however, I found somewhat underwhelming. One thing is that Van Tilborg writes very much for the scholarly audience. Many quotes from epigraphy are left in Greek, leaving one without a strong understanding of Greek with a lot to wonder what's being said. The cases where parallels are drawn prove generally not to be as paradigm shifting as one might wish. Ephesians respected the gods; Christians respected Jesus. Emperors were thought of like gods; Jesus was thought of like a god. And so on.

Of course, as with most books, there were occasional gems of interest, like the large number of epigraphs with John's name featured versus the much smaller number with Paul's name, suggesting that indeed John had a larger role in the city. It's these sort of things that made the book worth the effort.

From "From Slavery to Freedom" by John Hope Franklin ****

This basic history of the African American from pre-enslavement to the late 1960s is a classic on par with Lerone Bennett's. That one is arguably slightly easier reading, but this one at times has a certain poetry to it and also covers even more history. I chose to read the 1967 version (the third edition) rather than one of the many later editions that continue to come out every few years because the 1967 version would have been one the Black Panthers would have actually assigned in their later years.

Items that stood about regarding this book, as opposed to Bennett's: Franklin puts the Black United States in the context of Black America in general, so there are chapters on the Caribbean and Brazil. This gives one a better sense of the slave trade overall. Of note is the fact that in many of these other areas, the same sort of racism that became paramount to the continuation of slavery in the United States wasn't always present in some of these other colonies/nations. It's like we had to run a certain class of people down in order to continue to justify the manner in which we treated them--not so much in some other locales. A freedperson was just as much a citizen no matter the color of skin. That said, evidence doesn't always match up with such a claim. Some freedpeople joined with slaves in indepedence causes; some joined with the colonizers. It just depended. And likewise, darker skin, unfortunately, sometimes leads to racist impulses even elsewhere. In that sense, I think of the C. L. R. James book I read and how he puts African-descended people everywhere into a similar struggle.

As with Bennett's book, I also particularly enjoyed the portion of the work about Reconstruction. Bennett made clear many of the gains that were made during that period after the Civil War. Franklin doesn't seem as keen on those temporal improvements, focusing more on how short of ideal that were. What's more, he also writes a bit of the initial couple of years after the Civil War, which really in a way precede Reconstruction. It's like the South went right back to doing what it had been doing before, though with enslavement having a different name (many Confederates returned to government). The abuse heaped on former slaves is part of the reason the federal government ended up taking a firmer stand and even banning former Confederate officeholders for a time. But I hadn't ever really thought of that short gap between the war and Reconstruction; it really isn't talked about much.

The sections on the civil rights movement were interesting insofar as Franklin puts so much of that history together. I have read a lot about this period, but I realized I've rarely read about the various parts of the movement in the larger context--how sit-ins fit alongside marches alongside Freedom Bus Rides and so on. One thing I found interesting was the way that the state government tried to stop the Montgomery Bus Boycott by claiming the people were illegally interfering with business (seems utterly ridiculous: you MUST shop at/eat at/use this business--what kind of law is that?).