ABSTRACT
Henry Grady, the Georgian regarded as the spokesman for the New South, argued in 1885 that no social differences were more important than those provided by racial distinctions. Grady’s critic, George Washington Cable, argued rather for a class-based social hierarchy asserting that education and civility were not the sole preserves of white southerners. He challenged his detractors, ‘tell us gentleman, which are you really for: the colour line, or the line of character, intelligence and property?’1 By the turn of the twentieth century the codification of a host of Jim Crow laws had ensured that it was a strict colour line which would prevail in the New South.2 Revolving around opinions on C. Vann Woodward’s seminal work The Strange Career of Jim Crow,3 historians have vigorously debated when racial segregation emerged in the post-bellum South and the extent to which race relations could have followed alternative paths. Woodward himself, however, contended that he started the subject of the origins of segregation in the South ‘on the wrong foot … what I did was to put the question when before the questions where and how’.4 Certainly there was a pattern of regional differences in the growth of segregation; therefore a southern-wide blanket of de facto segregation did not emerge immediately after the Civil War. Nevertheless, the colour line was clearly etched in the minds of white – and to an extent black – southerners before the emergence of de jure Jim Crow in the 1890s. Fundamental to an exploration of racial segregation in the South then is an understanding of why this legal codification occurred. Woodward’s Strange Career of Jim Crow still remains the starting
point for any discussion of racial segregation in the post-bellum South. Originally written as the text for three lectures to be given at the University of Virginia in 1954, Strange Career was heavily influenced by the time in which it was written. Constructing his thesis as the Supreme Court ruled in the Brown decision that racial segregation in
schools was unconstitutional, Woodward sought to use the past to show the possibilities of the future. Explaining that strict segregation of black and white had not been the only and inevitable shape of race relations in southern history provided optimism that desegregation of the region’s schools could succeed. As Woodward later explained,
My first concern was to overcome the prevailing impression – and in southern ideology the firm conviction – that the subject had no history, that race relations in the South remained basically unchanged, that changes in law, whether associated with slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, or segregation, had been superficial and resulted in no real change in relations between races. No changes, no history.5
