The most influential historian of our time, C. Vann Woodward has
forged his place in American learning and culture from two
sometimes opposing, sometimes complementary urges: to work for
social justice and to reveal the past without bias. Underlying his
career has been the knowledge that his native South, because of its
traumatic experience of defeat and disgrace, holds within its past
truths that could instruct the nation as a whole, perhaps ease it
through the dilemmas and racial inequality and social strife, and
guide it away from the mad pursuits of war and political
repression. C. Vann Woodward, Southerner is a chronicle of
Woodward's life, of the tumultuous times that have engaged him and
shaped his thought, and of the historical profession that has
accorded him its highest honors of respect and unstinting
criticism. Jack Roper begins with Woodward's birth, in 1908, to an
aristocratic family in eastern Arkansas and his youth in the
Oachita valley. By the time Woodward left his home state to study
at Emory University, he had already demonstrated the urge toward
dissent that drove him, throughout the first decades of his career,
to confront social and racial injustice, to press relentlessly
outward from his own position of security and confront the civil
strife that simmered outside the hedgerows of academia. In Chapel
Hill and Atlanta, in New York and Baltimore, in his books and in
his actions, Woodward spoke to the present even as he wrote of the
past. By no means uncritical of Woodward's works, Roper nonetheless
shows that books such as Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, Origins of the
New South, and The Strange Career of Jim Crow have effectively
defined the terms of historical debate, often asking the
"impertinent first question" that spurred other historians to seek
fuller answers. Of those books, The Strange Career of Jim Crow is
closest to Woodward's ultimate concerns and has caused him his
gravest doubts-for a time he almost disowned the book that Martin
Luther King, Jr. called "the bible of the civil rights movement."
Those doubts came at a time in American history that Woodward found
particularly ominous: the Vietnam years when it seemed that the
lights of civil rights and social progress had lost their steady
glow. In the mid-1970s, however, Woodward regained his political
engagement, and today he continues his work of bringing-through
numerous book reviews and essays-the insights of the historical
profession to the intelligent, concerned reader. "What has the
historian to do with hope?" These words of Woodward's late
colleague David Potter in response to The Strange Career of Jim
Crow encapsulate the conflict that both inspired and occasionally
beset that book's author. For it is Woodward's almost continual
commitment to social change that made his books so powerful when
they were published, so diminished in strength when examined in
later decades. This tension between advocacy and scholarship,
between experience and learning both marks the greatest challenge
for Woodward and defines his greatness as a cultural figure, as a
conscience for his profession and for our time.
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