Passage 39
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-