The South's Interlude

_"South-by-Northeast: The Journey of C. Vann Woodward" by Theodore Rosengarten, in Doubletake (Summer 1999), Center for Documentary Studies at Duke Univ., 1317 W. Pettigrew St., Durham, N.C. 27705._

The renowned historian C. Vann Woodward, an emeritus professor at Yale University, was born in 1908 in his grandmother’s house in Vanndale, Arkansas, and it seems to him now, looking back, that it was when he was five or so and staying in that house that he first glimpsed what would become the theme of his most resonant scholarly books.

"Across the street from my grandmother’s house... was a house owned by former slaves who did well and bought some land," he tells Rosengarten, a historian currently at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. "Every Sunday afternoon, Miss Sally would come and visit Miss Ida, my grandmother.... She had been the slave of my grandmother’s parents. They . . . had lots to talk about. And my grandmother entertained her in the parlor." Not the kitchen, but the parlor! "That’s when I knew," he says, "there must have been an interlude"— a time after the Civil War when southerners lived without legal racial segregation.

If southerners had done that once, done it for decades, they could do it again: that was the hopeful implication of Woodward’s Origins of the New South (1951), The Strange Career of Jim Crow, his 1957 history of segregation in the South, and other works. He showed, writes Rosengarten, that legal segregation "developed relatively late, an invention of a small, monied elite who exploited the myth of race to solidify its hold over the region. . . . Segregation was, in a word, reversible."

Origins of the New South was Woodward’s answer to W. J. Cash’s Mind of the South (1940), which took the pessimistic view that for the region to give up white supremacy would mean renouncing tradition and nature, that the modern was just a continuation of the old. Three years after Origins, Woodward, at the invitation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, wrote a brief on Reconstruction for the plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case.

Then, in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, "talking," as he said, "to white people back home," Woodward told them that segregation was rooted in the politics of the 1890s, not in ancient custom or tradition, and he argued that it was not worth preserving. That same year, 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus sent the National Guard into Little Rock’s Central High School to thwart racial integration.

Decades of attacks and revisionist criticism have prompted Woodward to alter his view of Reconstruction somewhat. He "no longer disputes that ‘de facto segregation was very strong right after the war,’ " says Rosengarten. "But after work and outside of church, he maintains, whites and blacks could be found together ‘in bars, at balls, in bed, everything.’ " Just as Miss Sally and Miss Ida could be found in his grandmother’s parlor when he was a boy.