The Strange Career of Jim Crow

This chapter opens with an extended quotation from Charleston’s News and Courier in 1898 that describes the absurd consequences of segregationist doctrine as a reductio ad absurdum. The heavily ironic critique listed the resources required to maintain Jim Crow, writing, “There should be Jim Crow sections of the jury box, and a separate Jim Crow dock and witness stand in every court—and a Jim Crow Bible for colored witnesses to kiss” (127). However, as Woodward reflects, a different kind of irony emerged in hindsight: The reality that the editor described—and clearly understood as absurd—very quickly became the norm in the South, a “reality that was regarded as the only sensible solution to a vexing problem, a solution having the sanction of tradition and long usage” (128). The ironic tone used in the editorial undermines the argument that segregation was inevitable. This is an illustrative example of Woodward’s technique of challenging arguments that segregation was a logical outgrowth of Southern history by citing historical voices that contested segregationist doctrine.

Woodward argues that “the South’s adoption of extreme racism was due not so much to a conversion as it was to a relaxation of the opposition” (129). Woodward describes the “mushroom growth” racist and divisive legislation passed in the first two decades of the 20th century as responding to these shifts. However, had the tide moved the other way either nationally or regionally, the outcome could have been different. Segregation was the result of pessimism and tension between classes and political parties that resulted in “less sympathy, tolerance, and understanding between the races” (171).

To demonstrate the rise of white supremacy, Woodward studies Southern letters from the 1880s and 1900s that reveal shifting racial attitudes and a deterioration in race relations. He also studies the portrayal of African Americans in fiction, noting a shift from the often patronizing and sentimental fiction of authors such as Joel Chandler Harris and George Washington Cable to the “venomous or bitter” (167) treatment of African Americans by the end of the 19th century. Finally, he looks at scholarship by Southern historians from the period.

The uses and misuses of history surfaces in this chapter. Woodward describes how “the legend of Reconstruction was revived, refurbished, and relived by the propagandists as if it were an immediate background of the current crisis” (155). In showing how history can become propaganda, Woodward establishes the significance of his argument that the complexities, nuances, and tensions of history should be teased out and articulated. Later in the chapter he describes how Southern historians writing in the early 20th century about Reconstruction were influenced by the white supremacy movement. History, he reminds us, is not neutral.

Woodward emphasis the role of social theory in shaping how we understand history. In particular, he singles out the impact of William Graham Sumner’s Folkways, published in 1907. Sumner articulated the importance of unconscious social conventions, which he describes as “uniform, universal in the group, imperative, and invariable” (182). Sumner argued that these conventions exceeded legislation, writing that “stateways cannot change folkways” (182). Woodward argues that this body of social theory was used to justify segregation as an inevitable “folkway” of the South. He also quotes David L. Cohn, who wrote in 1944, “It is William Graham Sumner’s dictum that you cannot change the mores of a people by law, and since the social segregation of the races is the most deep-seated and pervasive of the Southern mores” (183). Woodward seeks to disprove this thesis through a close examination of the historical record, and he compiles sources that show change and discontinuity in race relations over time. This, of course, has a larger implication: that racism and segregation were not inevitable.