40 pages • 1 hour read
C. Vann WoodwardThe Strange Career of Jim Crow
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1955A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Declining Years of Jim Crow”
Chapter 5 centers on the implications of the Supreme Court decision on segregation in public schools. The Supreme Court judgment removed any legal foundation for segregation with its decision on May 17, 1954. It was officially implemented on May 31, 1955. In the year between the ruling and implementation, the Jim Crow system remained in place across the South, though it was on the defensive. The Supreme Court decision noted the different circumstances facing schools and left the implementation to local districts. Segregationists challenged the Supreme Court rulings, but by January 1956, 19 court decisions involving school segregation cases sided with the Supreme Court. In that same period African Americans organized for integration, and the NAACP filed petitions for desegregation with 170 school boards in 17 states in the summer of 1955.
By 1956, race relations in the South had deteriorated rapidly. Alabama said the “fateful words, ‘null, void, and of no effect’” (263), signaling its decision to ignore the Supreme Court ruling. This was echoed by Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina, while North Carolina “adopted a ‘resolution of protest’” (263). These tactics of “resistance, evasion, and delay opened by laws” delayed desegregation (276). Progress was largely confined to the District of Columbia and border states. Defiance of the Supreme Court decision was aided by President Eisenhower’s silence on the issue; it would be three years before he called for compliance with the court ruling.
Widespread protests across the South were organized by African Americans in the 1960s. For instance, four college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, held a sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter after being refused service. Sit-ins then spread across the South; they were an effective protest method as the “self-discipline and fortitude of the youths, who silently bore abuse and insult, touched the white South’s respect for courage” (283). There was also a larger societal shift away from the conservatism of the 1950s, and both major parties adopted anti-segregation in 1960.
Violence escalated across the South as segregationists blocked African Americans from attending school. Racial unrest resulted in mob violence, lynchings, and bombings. On August 28, 1963, 200,000 people marched to the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” address. In June 1963, President Kennedy sent legislation to Congress that
covered equal access to all public accommodations, prohibited discrimination in any state program receiving federal aid, outlawed racial barriers in employment, in labor union membership, and in voting, and authorized the Justice Department to bring suits for desegregation of public schools (301).
After the assassination of President Kennedy, his successor Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, which immediately banned Jim Crow laws. In 1965 the Voting Rights Act eliminated barriers to voting. Despite some resistance and violence, there was a mood of optimism much like the one that accompanied the end of slavery.
Chapter 5 Analysis
Woodward documents escalating racial tensions in the South. In 1958 and 1959 a wave of extremism spread across the South, where “books were banned, libraries were purged, newspapers were slanted, magazines disappeared from stands, television programs were withheld, films were excluded” (279). The events following the Supreme Court decision were incredibly complex, and Woodward focuses on a few events that galvanized public opinion and forced change.
In September 1957Governor Faubus of Arkansas used national guardsmen to prevent nine African American students from entering Central High School in Little Rock. The guardsmen were withdrawn three weeks later, following a court order. When the students entered the school, a mob descended and forced them to leave. In response, President Eisenhower ordered 1,000 paratroopers to Little Rock and placed 10,000 Arkansas national guardsmen on federal service so the students could attend school. In response, the governor closed schools for the 1958-1959 school year. Faubus’s extreme response—using national guardsmen to prevent the Little Rock Nine from registering for school and canceling an entire school year—reflects the lengths that segregationists were willing to go to defend their cause.
Mississippi and Alabama had strong resistance to segregation and high racial tensions. In 1955 a group of white men in Mississippi lynched a 14-year-old boy named Emmett Till. Till was beaten, mutilated, shot, and dumped in a river. No one was punished for the crime. Till’s murder was a galvanizing moment in the civil rights movement and remains an important touchstone in the history of racial brutality in the American South. Another example of violent resistance to desegregation occurred in 1962, when Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett personally blocked James Meredith from registering as a student at the University at Oxford, defying a federal court order. Once again, the federal government intervened to force compliance, and 320 federal marshals escorted Meredith to his dormitory. In a television address, President Kennedy spoke to Mississippi, telling the state that “the honor of your university and the state are in the balance” (291). President Kennedy’s address did not reduce tensions. In what became known as the Battle of Oxford, a mob descended and “fought with stones, bricks, clubs, bottles, iron bars, gasoline bombs, and firearms” (291). Two people were killed, and 375 were injured. Meredith was registered that day. A mob attacking federal marshals was a highly unusual attack on the institutions of the United States. 1963 saw further violence in the lower South. Woodward singles out a series of riots and bombings in Birmingham as a key flashpoint.
In his conclusion to the chapter, Woodward draws a parallel between the optimism following the legal victories and political shifts in the 1960s and the end of slavery. 1963 was “the second time the assassination of a president had brought a Southerner to the White House to preside over a reconstruction of race relations” (302). Presidents Kennedy and Johnson are given credit for prioritizing the civil rights act and using the executive branch’s power to enact significant change. Re-enfranchisement and desegregation were massive victories, but Woodward cautions that the structural conditions that produced these moments are not as easily changed. He highlights two false assumptions that optimists held following slavery and the Civil Rights Act: “The first was that the legal end of the institution abolished meant the end of abuse that was outlawed. The second was that the institution abolished was responsible for all, or nearly all, of the troubles of its victims” (312). As Woodward concludes, the reality was not this simple.
