In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In October 1954, Professor C. Vann Woodward delivered at the University of Virginia the lectures on the origins of southern racial segregation that the following year would be published under the title The Strange Career of Jim Crow. In the years just after Reconstruction, he said, the patterns of race relations in the region were strikingly diverse, varying from town to town and from institution to institution, and the opinions of white southerners about the optimal structure of racial adjustment were correspondingly in ®ux. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth that the governmental enforcement of statutorily de¤ned racial boundaries and the elimination of blacks from the southern electorate by constitutional requirements became the universal regional standard. The source of this development was political. In the early 1890s, Democratic Party politicians had aggressively denounced their Populist adversaries as advocates of racial equality, and therefore as enemies of white security, and the polarization of racial alternatives that had emerged from these campaigns had driven the more moderate, paternalist wing of the Democrats into an acceptance of the leadership of the popular racist demagogues who had made legal segregation and constitutional disfranchisement Democratic Party doctrine. Out of the Populist elections, therefore, had emerged a politically expedient orthodoxy that, because of the demands of political competition, had hardened after the turn of the century into an in®exible regionwide set of legal mandates, embodied in legislative acts and municipal ordinances. Woodward’s portrait of these events began almost at once to provoke objections. An uncompromising commitment to white supremacy had been general among white southerners since colonial times, his opponents observed; the militant defense of slavery established this fact beyond cavil. Segregated institutions, and in particular segregated churches and schools, had already begun to appear during Reconstruction. Moreover , black leaders seeking the advancement of their race had often initiIntroduction 1 ated their establishment. The new statutory and constitutional commands of the 1890s had merely codi¤ed and generalized practices already widespread . But the codi¤cation and generalization of these practices formed precisely the point, Woodward replied. During the 1880s alternative patterns of racial contact were to be found throughout the region. There were even prominent white spokesmen, usually radical Populists, who questioned white supremacy. And among the white supremacists there was as yet no single accepted institutional expression of the prejudice. By the 1900s, however, the alternatives had been eliminated and dissent had effectively been criminalized. This momentous transformation had been imposed by governmental authorities as a result of explicitly political calculations .1 While the controversy about Woodward’s argument was engul¤ng a portion of the academy, the nation was being engulfed by the con®ict surrounding the attempt to extirpate the very ordinances, statutes, and constitutional provisions that had been Woodward’s subject. Indeed, Woodward ’s lectures themselves had grown directly out of his efforts during 1953 to assist the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the preparation of its historical brief to be submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court as a part of the argument of the school segregation cases, which had been decided just¤ve months before he addressed the Virginia audience. But it was the escalating civil rights movement in the decade following the school desegregation decision that, rather ironically, underlay much of the skepticism in subsequent years about his ideas. The black demonstrations seemed so deeply rooted in the most fundamental ethical convictions of Western civilization, and the white resistance seemed so fully to represent the immemorial evil of which that civilization was capable, that Woodward’s depiction of southern segregation as a relatively recent and distinctly contingent historical development came to seem to many observers to be belied by the reality surrounding them. How could a system that incarnated a bigotry as old as the region itself, that was so unmistakably a transmutation of the slavery that had preceded it, that was defended so tenaciously by what appeared to be so nearly unbroken a white phalanx, be properly conceived as a product of a few largely forgotten local elections that had occurred within a six-year period some seventy years before? In truth, however, if the civil rights movement had been correctly understood at the time, it would have had very different lessons to teach. Three aspects of those lessons began to emerge relatively quickly. In the¤rst place, it became clear that white southerners’ doubts about segregation were both more extensive and more complex than...

Share