C. Vann Woodward

American · 1908 to 1999

Comer Vann Woodward was born on November 13, 1908, in Vanndale, Arkansas, and grew up in a South still shaped by the world his own scholarship would later dismantle. He earned a bachelor's degree from Emory University, a master's from Columbia, and a doctorate in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1937. In the 1930s his sympathies ran to the political left, and by the 1950s he had become one of the most respected liberal voices writing about race and the American South. His early books, Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel (1938) and Origins of the New South, 1877 to 1913 (1951), which won the Bancroft Prize, established him as a historian willing to overturn comfortable myths about the region's past. In the spring of 1954, weeks after the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, he delivered the Richards Lectures at the University of Virginia, arguing that legal segregation was a late invention of the 1890s rather than an unbroken inheritance from slavery. Published the following year as The Strange Career of Jim Crow, the book became one of the most influential works of history published in twentieth century America, read widely inside and outside the civil rights movement it helped to justify. Woodward taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1946 to 1961 and then at Yale, where he held the rank of Sterling Professor of History until his retirement in 1977, directing twenty-five doctoral dissertations along the way. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1969 and later edited Mary Chesnut's Civil War, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1982. In later decades his politics moved rightward and he grew critical of some directions taken by the civil rights movement he had once championed, a shift that complicated but never erased his reputation as the twentieth century's foremost historian of the American South. He died on December 17, 1999, in Hamden, Connecticut, at the age of ninety-one.