This book, referred to by Martin Luther King as "the historical bible of the Civil Rights movement," makes a compelling case that the Jim Crow system of racial legislation that dominated the South was not a natural outgrowth of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, or even Redemption, but rather a haphazard creation of Southern whites in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
This study became one of the basic books in America on this subject after the first edition was published in 1955. Its popularity continued to soar with the second edition of this much-honored work. In the third edition, C. Vann Woodward brings to a close his account of the strange career of Jim Crow by discussing the ramifications of his demise as a legal entity. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 legally ended Jim Crowism. Five days after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, the Watts riots exploded, heralding a new era. Woodward describes the confusing, dramatic, often shattering events that took place after that--the murder of Martin Luther King; white backlash encouraged by black activism; the effect of the Vietnam War upon the civil rights movement; and the change in national mood when Richard Nixon replaced Lyndon Johnson in the White House. He also identifies many personalities who came to prominence after 1965, including H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, Julian Bond, Bobby Seale, and George Wallace. "By 1965 ... when victory over legal Jim Crow at last seemed almost assured, the suppressed yearning for separate racial identity burst forth with startling force. Its spokesmen accused civil rights leaders of forfeiting racial identity and offering integration as a substitute. But integration with the white culture, they declared, was a betrayal of racial identity and an insult to racial pride. Hence the paradox of victory of the civil rights movement coinciding with violent escalation of protest. The new outburst was protesting something else. Its leaders were to offer some strange programs--all the old varieties of black nationalism, including the back-to-Africa one, and many new ones as well. Some expressions of impulse were irrational and some were violent, but behind them were the genuine needs that the struggle against segregation had not fulfilled."--Adapted from dust jacket.
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