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.
Essay Topics
Describe and analyze the “Woodward thesis” of segregation and Southern history.
Identify and analyze the concrete steps—both legal and extra-legal—that segregationists took following Reconstruction to construct Jim Crow laws. Analyze how this case study proves or challenges Woodward’s argument that segregation developed unevenly and was not inevitable.
The Strange Career of Jim Crow spans the end of slavery to the rise of black nationalism. Through a comparison of two different historical moments, analyze either the rhetorical strategies or the primary and secondary source material that Woodward uses to build his argument.
Compare the actions of the judicial and/or executive branches following Reconstruction and Second Reconstruction to assess how legal and legislative decisions shaped the “strange career” of Jim Crow laws.
In Chapter 6 Woodward details the shifting terrain of race relations in the 1950s and 1960s. What changes does Woodward document, and how does he analyze these changes within the context of his historical study of the South?
Racial violence broke out at the end of both Reconstruction and Second Reconstruction. Compare the historical circumstances that shaped these outbursts of violence and the demands of the rioters.
Woodward cites William Graham Sumner’s Folkways (1907), which describes the importance of unconscious social conventions and biases in shaping society. What implications does Sumner’s argument have for understanding race relations? Describe and analyze how Woodward challenges Sumner’s argument that “stateways cannot change folkways” (182). Support your analysis with textual evidence.
In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Woodward repeatedly references the writing of history. In Woodward’s view, what is the historian’s role in shaping how we understand history? How do his rhetorical strategies and this awareness of his craft shape the history he presents?
Woodward moves between regional, national, and international factors that both reinforced and challenged segregation. Through a focused study of one historical moment, compare how at least two of these factors intersected.
In Chapter 4 Woodward writes: “It is clear at least that the Negro himself played a larger role in the new movement for emancipation than he had in the abolitionist crusade that led to the original emancipation” (213). What role do African Americans play in driving history in Woodward’s analysis? Are they presented as active subjects or passive objects of history? Does this change throughout the text?
