C. Vann Woodward, who is ninety on 13 November 1998, is the author of perhaps the most famous work of history every to have rocked the Southern United States. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, first presented as the James W. Richard lectures at the University of Virginia, appeared in 1955: only one year after the Supreme Court's celebrated decision in Brown v. Board of Education, that racially segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because separate facilities were “inherently unequal.” White Southern publicists and politicians stormed and raged that racial separation was in the order of nature, the segregation laws were from time immemorial, and that Chief Justice Warren ought to be impeached; and now came a soft-spoken, professionally respected historian, himself from Arkansas, to tell them, and, worse, to tell the world, that the South's universal segregation or “Jim Crow” laws in fact dated at most only from the 1890s – well within the lifetime of many who were still expressing their opinions.

The controversy was intense and prolonged. And it came to involve less politically motivated questions of historical interpretation because Woodward was often taken to have been referring more generally to the substance of race relations as well as the segregation laws. He accepted that some of his formulations required reconsideration, and the book, in constant demand, went through several revisions and four editions, the last appearing in 1974. But the core of the argument has survived to leave an enduring legacy in Southern historiography.