The analysis of Woodward in THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW 1955 essays

The analysis of Woodward in THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW 1955 essays The paper will analyze C. Vann Woodward's "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" (1955). "Woodward begin his series of lectures by nothing that, although an early form of Jim Crow-type legislation could be found in the cities of the antebellum North ("One of the strangest things about the career of Jim Crow was that the system was born in the North and reached an advanced age before moving South in force"), race relations in the nineteenth-century South were more often than not characterized by intermingling and close contact. (17) "In most aspects of slavery as practiced in the antebellum south," he notes, "segregation would have been an inconvenience and an obstruction to the functioning of the system. The very nature of the institution made separation of the races for the most part impracticable." (12) Similarly, while some elements of Jim Crow showed up during Reconstruction (such as the separation of churches and segregation of public schools), "race relations during Reconstruction could not be said to have crystallized or stabilized nor to have become what they later became. There were too many cross currents and contradictions, revolutionary innovations and violent reactions...for a time old and new rubbed shoulders and so did black and white in a manner that differed significantly from Jim Crow of the future or slavery of the past." (25, 26) In fact, Woodward, argues, even Redemption didn't herald the onset of Jim Crow. While "it would certainly be preposterous to leave the impression that any evidence I have submitted indicates a golden age of race relations in the period between Redemption and complete segregation," Woodward argues, "the era of stiff conformity and fanatical rigidity that was to come had not yet closed in and shut off all contact between the races, driven the Negro...