The Strange Career of Jim Crow
The Strange Career of Jim Crow When The Strange Career of Jim Crow was first published in 1955, it was immediately recognized to be the definitive study of racial relations in the United States. Professor Woodward discusses the “unanticipated developments and revolutionary changes at the very center of the subject.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to the book as the historical bible of the civil rights movement. The Strange Career of Jim Crow won the Pulitzer for Mary Chestnut’s Civil War and a Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South. Jim Crow laws were state and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. They mandated racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern states of the former Confederacy, with, starting in 1890, a "separate but equal" status for African Americans. The separation in practice led to conditions for African Americans that tended to be inferior to those provided for white Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. Segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States. Northern segregation was generally patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices, and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades. Some examples of Jim Crow laws are the segregation of public schools, public places, and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants, and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was also segregated. Jim Crow laws, Woodward argued, were not part of the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction; they came later and were not inevitable. Following the Compromise of 1877, in the 1870s and 1880s there were localized informal practices of racial separation in some areas of society along with what he termed "forgotten alternatives" in others. Finally the 1890s saw white southerners "capitulate to racism" to create "legally prescribed, rigidly enforced,