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 6-AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Career Becomes Stranger”
On August 6, 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. On August 11, a riot broke out in Watts, a neighborhood in Los Angeles. Over the course of four days, riots raged until 46 square miles were brought under military control. Thirty-four people died, more than 1,000 were injured, and 4,000 were arrested. Watts marked the beginning of four summers of race riots throughout the United States. The riots took place in African American neighborhoods and targeted symbols of white authority, including the police, firefighters, the National Guard, and white property.
Woodward outlines several factors that influenced the wave of riots. Despite legal desegregation, de facto desegregation was rising in the North, fueled by white flight to the suburbs. Unemployment rates for African American workers was high. African American leadership shifted to the North, became more secular in character, and focused more on economic issues rather than civil rights. African American leaders like Malcolm X became powerful voices for separation and increased African American autonomy. Major civil rights organizations, including the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), moved away from integration as a goal. In 1966 Stokely Carmichael took over the SNCC leadership and introduced the term “Black Power.” The rise of the Black Panthers in 1966 articulated black nationalism and focused attention on police brutality. Advocating black separatism, these organizations repudiated “the very ideal toward which the civil rights movement had been striving” (323). This shift was not universal, however. In 1968 the NAACP condemned the “reversal of the trend toward integration,” describing its supporters as “extremists who are shrilly and insistently espousing apartheid; racism, including anti-Semitism; intimidation and violence” (327). Moreover, separatists never received widespread support from African Americans.
Given the rise of African American resistance to integration, Woodward reflects that the
career of Jim Crow might become even stranger than it had been in the past. Black champions of separatism joined hands with white champions of segregation. Former integrationists accepted separatism as the viable compromise (358).
Many viewed the loss of a distinct African American identity demanded by integration as too high a high cost. While many African Americans remained committed to integration, separation became an important demand in this period.
Afterword Summary
William S. McFeely, a historian at the University of Virginia, wrote the Afterword. He describes the social impact of Woodward’s book, which “became part of a revolution” (362). In 1964 the University of Virginia invited Woodward to deliver the James W. Richard Lectures. After Woodward was invited, the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Woodward presented three lectures to an integrated audience which became the foundation for The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Woodward delivered a clear challenge to “the assumption that race relations had been immutably fixed over the course of Southern history” (366). The clear implication of Woodward’s history was that change has been a constant in Southern history, and “what had been put in place in the 1890s could be replaced by something better in the 1950s” (367).
Chapter 6-Afterword Analysis
The final chapter has a less optimistic tone than the chapters written in 1955, reflecting the tumultuous years since the book was first written. In Chapter 6 Woodward analyzes how the politics of black nationalism shaped the history of segregation and integration. This period saw a Back-to-Africa movement and a rise in cultural nationalism. A larger identification with the Global South also emerged, as African Americans built connections with decolonial struggles worldwide. Woodward concludes that with integration, “the emancipated were expected to shed not only such distinctions as they abhorred but those distinctions they cherished as essential to their identity” (361). The breakdown of a unified, cohesive civil rights movement reflects the complex desires and demands that African Americans had.
By 1966, the Second Reconstruction had run its course, from the “high fevers of idealism, through achievement won by self-sacrifice, and on through self-doubt, disenchantment, and withdrawal” (345), and signs of reaction began to surface. Despite the significant political and legal victories for integration, by 1968 the president’s Commission on Civil Disorders described that “our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” (322). Woodward concludes that this outcome was not inevitable. In the 1970s the situation continued to deteriorate. President Nixon called for an “open society” which “does not have to be homogeneous, or even fully integrated” (350). Nixon’s approach to race relations was a period of “benign neglect” (350), a radical shift from the decisive action taken by President Kennedy and President Johnson. This is another example of history not following a progressively linear path. The massive civil rights gains in the 1960s were eroded by both neglect and rising racial tensions.
Woodward assesses these gains in the 1960s by looking at political and economic data. African Americans took office in increasing numbers, and incidents of voter suppression became increasingly rare. Though economic gains were more uneven, at least 30% of African Americans had entered the middle class by the end of the 1960s. This was a significant increase from barely 10% in 1960. However, over the 1970s, many of these economic gains eroded, and African American unemployment rates remained much higher than white unemployment. While radical African American activism found some support among upper-class white people, it alienated lower-class white people. A narrative circulated that African Americans got handouts while white people were being left behind, which fueled racial tensions. This highlights how overarching social issues like racism and economic inequality cannot be easily overcome by legislation or legal rulings.
