Woodward, C Vann

▪ 2000

      American historian (b. Nov. 13, 1908, Vanndale, Ark.—d. Dec. 17, 1999, Hamden, Conn.), combined his scholarship abilities, especially his knowledge of history, and his sense of social justice with his talents for storytelling to create chronicles of the post-Civil War American South that were both interesting to read and enlightening. In his most widely known book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), which became a best-seller, he pointed out that even after Reconstruction, blacks and whites had generally lived on equal terms and that their legal segregation, as mandated by the Jim Crow laws, did not have its roots in the distant past, as many Southerners claimed, but had come about relatively recently and thus should be reversible. Woodward began his college education at Henderson-Brown College, Arkadelphia, Ark., but transferred to Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., where he received a bachelor's degree in 1930. In Atlanta he met a number of black intellectuals and set upon his social activist path, determined to bring about change in the South. After receiving (1932) a master's degree from Columbia University, New York City, Woodward returned to Atlanta, where he taught at Georgia Tech for a time. In 1937 he earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, and he then taught at the Universities of Florida and Virginia. Woodward's first major work, the biography Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel, was published in 1938. It served to negate the image of the Populist reform movement and other views of the South perpetuated by numerous popular books. Woodward served in the navy during World War II, and his book The Battle for Leyte Gulf (1947) came out of his war experiences. In 1946 Woodward joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. He taught there until 1961, when he became Sterling professor of history at Yale University. He retired in 1977. Among other of Woodward's books were Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (1951), The Burden of Southern History (1960), and the autobiographical Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History (1986). He also published articles in a number of notable magazines and edited several books. In 1982 Woodward won a Pulitzer Prize for one of the books he edited, Mary Chesnut's Civil War (1981).

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