C. Vann Woodward, who died in 1999 at the age of 91, was America's most
eminent Southern historian, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Mary
Chestnut's Civil War and a Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New
South. Now, to honor his long and truly distinguished career, Oxford is
pleased to publish this special commemorative edition of Woodward's most
influential work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. The Strange Career
of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the
book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after
the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools
desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments
for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical
Bible of the civil rights movement." The book offers a clear and
illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, presenting
evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s. Woodward
convincingly shows that, even under slavery, the two races had not been
divided as they were under the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s. In fact,
during Reconstruction, there was considerable economic and political
mixing of the races. The segregating of the races was a relative
newcomer to the region. Hailed as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of
the twentieth century, The Strange Career of Jim Crow has sold almost
a million copies and remains, in the words of David Herbert Donald, "a
landmark in the history of American race relations."
