The Strange Career of Jim Crow

The Strange Career of Jim Crow

2007

Martin Luther King called The Strange Career if Jim Crow - based on a series of lectures by C . Vann Woodward - the Bible of the civil rights movement ' In his lectures , Woodward argues that the Jim Crow Laws - which consisted of a legal code meant to separate Euro and Afro-Americans , bur actually had the effect of maintaining a second-class citizen status for Afro-Americans living in the former Confederacy - were in fact not a consequence of Reconstruction , the U .S . Civil War or even slavery itself

. Instead , according to Woodward these laws were arbitrary in nature , created in a haphazard way over the course of the post-Reconstruction era

According to Woodward , Jim Crow laws were enacted in Northern cities even before the Civil War , whereas in the South , such laws did not exist . Whereas the few Afro-Americans living in the north were often confined to their own communities , such segregation would have been highly impractical in the South (12 . Even during the post-war Reconstruction period , relations between Euro and Afro-Americans were not quite what they became later . Woodward writes , 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 . Woodward goes further emphasizing while race relations during the Redemption period were far from cordial and friendly , 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 Negroes from all public forums , silenced all white dissenters , put a stop to all rational discussion and exchange of views , and precluded all variety and experiment in types of interracial association (43 , 44

Woodward argues that there were actually three schools of thought on race relations during the last quarter of the nineteenth century , two of which were of significance . The first he calls conservatism ' This view was more paternalistic : the Conservatives believed that Afro-Americans should be assisted and receive an adequate education , so as to serve as a bulwark ' between the privileged class and low socio-economic status (SES ) Euro-Americans . In fact , while considering Afro-Americans to be inferior ' they believed that an excessive squeamishness or fussiness about contact with Negroes was commonly identified as a lower-class whit attitude ' while the reverse was a characteristic of quality ' people (47-50

The second view Woodward calls radicalism ' This was a more socialist position , emphasizing class struggle . Afro-Americans and low-SES Euro-Americans had a great deal in common from an economic standpoint (as had been the case almost three hundred years before among black slaves and white indentures . Radicals such as populist Tom Watson pointed out the equalitarianism of want and poverty ' and a kinship of a common grievance and a common oppressor (referring to the upper classes ) between the two groups (61 ) For a time during the...