The strange career of Jim Crow Book

This version of The Strange Career of Jim Crow represents four different editions: the original 1955 edition, a revised 1957 paperback, the second edition of 1966 and the third edition of 1974. As a work of history, each of these editions is flawed: the later parts of the book deal in then-current events and in writing about them the author is does not have available some of the important tools of a historian’s discipline such as examination of private or otherwise hidden documents or the revelations brought about by the passage of time. Most of the material on the 1950s and later was written at the time the events were unfolding or shortly after and are more like journalism, history written on deadline.

It would seem that the flaws are greater in each subsequent edition as the main changes made were to add accounts of events that took place since the previous editions and, as the author himself notes, the pace of events in the area of civil rights was dizzying and varied in the years from 1955 and 1974. However, in my reading I found that the accumulation of flaws became a kind of virtue in the final version of the book: as the author swings between welcoming the promise of the mid-1960s and despairing at the violence and retrenchments of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the book becomes a kind of object lesson in the limitations of what historical understanding can provide for interpretation of the present. History can provide context and parallels, but all situations have novel and unprecedented elements that put severe restrictions of the utility of the predictions and prescriptions of historians.

Vann Woodward’s primary message in the earlier parts of the book is that Draconian racial segregation in the South, rather than being a manifestation of a long established “folkway” resistant or impossible to change by legislation, is the result of specific actions taken around the turn of the century, two decades after the end of Reconstruction. In this short work the author does not go very deeply into the causes of this change, which seem inspired by a widespread white vindictiveness of obscure motivation. I hope to learn more from this author’s much longer Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, which is focused on the period in question.

The nature of the change in white perceptions of the logic behind and need for widespread segregation can be summed up by two editorials the author quotes from the Charleston News and Courier. The first is from 1898, against a proposed law mandating segregated railroad cars: ’As we have got on fairly well for a third of century, including a long period of reconstruction, without such a measure,’ wrote the editor, ‘we can probably get on as well hereafter without it, and certainly so extreme a measure should not be adopted and enforced without added and urgent cause.’ He then called attention to what he considered the absurd consequences to which such a law might lead once the principle of the thing were conceded. ‘If there must be Jim Crow cars on the railroads, there should be Jim Crow cars on the street railways. Also on all passenger boats … If there are to be Jim Crow cars, moreover, there should be Jim Crow waiting saloons at all stations, and Jim Crow eating houses … There should be Jim Crow sections of a jury box, and a separate Jim crow dock and witness stand in every court – and a Jim Crow Bible for colored witnesses to kiss. It would be advisable also to have a Jim Crow section in county auditors’ and treasurers’ offices for the accommodation of colored taxpayers. The two races are dreadfully mixed in these offices for weeks every year, especially about Christmas … There should be a Jim Crow department for making returns and paying for the privileges and blessings of citizenship. Perhaps the best plan would be, after all, to take the short cut to the general end … by establishing two or three Jim Crow counties at once, and turning them over to our colored citizens for their special and exclusive accommodation.’ Of course, “in a very short time,” as Vann Woodward notes, Apart from the Jim Crow counties and Jim Crow witness stand, all the improbable applications of the principle suggested by the editor in derision had been put into practice – down to and including the Jim Crow Bible.The second editorial, quoted more briefly, is from 1906 and represents an almost incomprehensible change in attitude: ’The “problem” is worse now than it was ten years ago,’ wrote the editor. Far from being ridiculous, segregation did not now seem sufficient. Mass deportation was the remedy. ‘Separation of the races is the only radical solution of the negro problem in this country … There is no room for them [the Negroes] here,’ declared the paper.