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.