C. Vann Woodwards The Strange Career of Jim Crow Essay example -- Str

C. Vann Woodwards The Strange public life of Jim CrowIn the months following the chocolate-brown v. Board of Education decision C. Vann Woodward wrote a series of lectures that would provide the innovation for one of the most historically significant pieces of nonfiction literature pen in the 20th century. Originally, Woodwards lectures were directed to a local and predominantly southern audience, but as his lectures matured into a comprehensive text edition they gained national recognition. In 1955 Woodward published the first version of The Strange Career of Jim Crow, a novel that would spark a fluid historical colloquy that would continue for the next twenty years. Woodward foresaw this possibility as he include in the first edition, Since I amdealing with a achievement of the past that has non been adequately investigated, and also with events of the present that have beat too rapidly and recently to have been properly digested and understood, it is rather essential that I shall make some mistakes. I shall expect and hope to be corrected. Over this time diaphragm Woodward released four separate editions, in chapter form, that modified, corrected, and responded to coetaneous criticisms. Although some of Woodwards peripheral ideas may have been amended in varying capacities his central and driving theme, often referred to as the Woodward Thesis, still remain intact. This thesis states that racial segregation (also known as Jim Crow) in the southward in the rigid and universal form that it had taken by 1954 did not begin right after the end of the Civil War, but or else towards the end of the century, and that before Jim Crow appeared there was a distinct period of experimentation in race relations in the South. Woodwards creative his... ...tional level, and articulates a distinctive view of the Civil Rights Movement and the federal governments regenerate and expanded commitment to the integration and the protection of the rights of Af rican-Americans as a blurb Reconstruction. The only flaw that I can find in this exceedingly regarded and seemingly impenetrable work is that Woodward treats African Americans as passive agents in a rapidly changing environment. He gives the impression that African Americans were slight participants and more like pawns in a large chess be controlled and governed by these competing ideologies. Although he does make concessions on this point in the net chapter, which was a later addition, throughout the book he consistently describes how extraneous forces were acting on freed slaves and what little role they played as actors in the racial struggles of the Jim Crow era.