Historians sometimes forget that history is conunu-
ally being made and experienced before it is studied,
interpreted, and read. These latter activities have their
own history, of course, which may impinge in unex-
(5) pected ways on public events. It is difficult to predict
when “new pasts” will overturn established historical
interpretations and change the course of history.
In the fall of 1954, for example, C. Vann Woodward
delivered a lecture series at the University of Virginia
(10) which challenged the prevailling dogma concerning the
history, continuity, and uniformity of racial segregation
in the South. He argued that the Jim Crow laws of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries not only
codified traditional practice but also were a determined
(15) effort to erase the considerable progress made by Black
people during and after Reconstruction in the 1870’s.
This revisionist view of Jim Crow legislation grew in
Part from the research that Woodward had done for the
NAACP legal campaign during its preparation for
(20) Brown v. Board of Education. The Supreme Court had
issued its ruling in this epochal desegregation case a few
months before Woodward’s lectures.
The lectures were soon published as a book. The
Strange Career of Jim Crow. Ten years later, in a
(25) preface to the second revised edition. Woodward
confessed with ironic modesty that the first edition
“had begun to suffer under some of the handicaps that
might be expected in a history of the American Revolu-
tion published in 1776.” That was a bit like hearing
(30)Thomas Paine apologize for the timing of his pamphlet
Common Sense, which had a comparable impact.
Although Common Sense also had a mass readership.
Paine had intended to reach and inspire: he was not a
historian, and thus not concerned with accuracy or the
(35) dangers of historical anachronism. Yet, like Paine,
Woodward had an unerring sense of the revolutionary
moment, and of how historical evidence could under-
mine the mythological tradition that was crushing the
dreams of new social possibilities. Martin Luther King,
(40) Jr.. testified to the profound effect of The Strange
Career of Jim Crow on the civil rights movement by
praising the book and quoting it frequently.