User:Hydrangeans/draft of The Strange Career of Jim Crow

The Strange Career of Jim Crow is a nonfiction book written by historian C. Vann Woodward about the development, origins, and history of Jim Crow laws in the southern United States. Woodward adapted the book from a series of lectures he gave at the University of Virginia during the summer of 1954, shortly after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial school segregation in the United States was unconstitutional. The Strange Career principally argues that segregation was a late development in southern history, as chattel slavery in the United States entailed frequent biracial interaction, and after the Civil War Jim Crow segregation laws did not widely take hold until the 1890s. In Woodward's articulation, the upshot of this was that since the inauguration of southern racial segregation had already been transformative, its abolition was reasonable. In the words of historian William S. McFeely, The Strange Career "modestly stated" a "call for the overthrow of" racial segregation in the United States.

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Popular myth holds that civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. called The Strange Career "the historical Bible of the Civil Rights Movement" in a speech at Montgomery, Alabama on March 23, 1956, though he did cite the book by name as evidence that racial segregation was "a political stratagem", in King's words, and not a natural state of post-Civil War American society.