The Strange Career of Jim Crow Quotes

“The other was that all the major civil rights organizations, new as well as old, were committed to the philosophy of non-violence, the doctrine preached by the most conspicuous leader in the Negro movement, Martin Luther King. ‘We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer,’ he told the whites, ‘and in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“Segregation in complete and full developed form did grow up contemporaneously with slavery, but not in its midst. One of the strangest things about the career of Jim Crow was that the system was born in the North and reached an advanced age before moving South in force.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“The success of Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for the presidential nomination and the management and direction of his race for President were in very considerable degree the work of an able school of Southern progressive politicians. Likewise the striking success of the progressive reforms of Wilson’s first administration owed much of their vigor to the work of Southern cabinet members”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“Eight days later he sent to Congress the most sweeping bill for civil rights up to that time, and urged it ‘not merely for reasons of economic efficiency, world diplomacy and domestic tranquility—but above all because it is right.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South,’ he said. ‘Where legal remedies are not at hand, redress is sought in the streets in demonstrations, parades and protests, which create tensions and threaten violence—and threaten lives.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“For black workers to define their problem primarily in terms of race was to ally themselves with white capitalists against white workers.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“Left intact, however, the black ghetto served as a kind of tariff wall to protect a monopolized market.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“The myth of black unity obscured the special interest of the black bourgeoisie as beneficiaries of racial separatism.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“too radical to be a part of it.’ Such groups as the Panthers—never more than five thousand and probably not half that number, or the RAMS, Revolutionary Armed Movement, which was even smaller—would never have gained the attention and influence they did had it not been for the susceptibility of white upper-class Northerners.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“The self-discipline and fortitude of the youths, who silently bore abuse and insult, touched the white South’s respect for courage.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“We conclude,’ said the Chief Justice, ‘that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“Thirteen Southern states spent about eight times as much for school construction and maintenance in 1951-52 as they had in 1939-40.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“The chances were slight at best, but several states began a desperate attempt at equalizing Negro schools.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“The Supreme Court followed a course it took in other fields by first sharpening its insistence on equality of accommodations in allegedly ‘separate but equal’ facilities, and then eventually ruled out segregation itself.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“There was historical irony in the new role of the Supreme Court, for in the First Reconstruction it was the Court that had taken the role of reaction, restraining, frustrating, or destroying the radical advances in civil rights made by the executive and legislative branches.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“The American faith in equality of opportunity and equality of rights has never really known any sectional boundaries.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“North Carolina and Virginia interdicted all fraternal orders or societies that permitted members of both races to address each other as brother.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“the results we have already reviewed. The picture of the Georgia Populist and the reformed Georgia conservative united on a platform of Negrophobia and progressivism was strikingly symbolical of the new era in the South.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“In some of them it had been thirty years or more since the reign of the carpetbagger, but the legend of Reconstruction was revived, refurbished, and relived by the propagandists as if it were an immediate background of the current crisis.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“The standard devices for accomplishing disfranchisement on a racial basis and evading the restrictions of the Constitution were invented by Mississippi,”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“The first step in applying the formula was the total disfranchisement of the Negro. In part this was presented as a guarantee that in the future neither of the white factions would violate the white man’s peace by rallying the Negro’s support against the other.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“These ‘permissions-to-hate’ came from sources that had formerly denied such permission.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“Alarmed by the success that the Populists were enjoying with their appeal to the Negro voter, the conservatives themselves raised the cry of ‘Negro domination’ and white supremacy, and enlisted the Negrophobe elements.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“would use a stronger term if there were one; for no other political movement—not that of 1776, nor that of 1860-1861—ever altered Southern life so profoundly.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“Throughout the North there was not only acquiescence among the white population in the ‘Southern Way’ of solving the race problem but a tendency to imitate it in practice.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“Just as the Negro gained his emancipation and new rights through a falling out between white men, he now stood to lose his rights through the reconciliation of white men.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“toward the end of the century was an almost simultaneous—and sometimes not unrelated—decline in the effectiveness of restraint that had been exercised by all three forces: Northern liberalism, Southern conservatism, and Southern radicalism.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“The South’s adoption of extreme racism was due not so much to a conversion as it was to a relaxation of the opposition.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“The policies of proscription, segregation, and disfranchisement that are often described as the immutable ‘folkways’ of the South, impervious alike to legislative reform and armed intervention, are of a more recent origin.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow

“prejudice, Watson told the two races: ‘You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both.”
― C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow