The paper will analyze C. Vann Woodward's "The Strange Career of Jim Crow."
             (1955). "Woodward begins his series of lectures by nothing that, although an
             an early form of Jim Crow-type legislation could be found in the cities of the
             antebellum North ("One of the strangest things about the career of Jim Crow
             was that the system was born in the North and reached an advanced age
             before moving South in force"), race relations in the nineteenth-century
             South was more often than not characterized by intermingling and close
             contact. (17) "In most aspects of slavery as practiced in the antebellum
             south," he notes, "segregation would have been an inconvenience and an
             obstruction to the functioning of the system. The very nature of the
             the institution made separation of the races for the most part impracticable."
             (12) Similarly, while some elements of Jim Crow showed up during
             Reconstruction (such as the separation of churches and segregation of
             public schools), "race relations during Reconstruction could not be said to
             have crystallized or stabilized nor to have become what they later became.
             There were too many cross-currents and contradictions, revolutionary
             innovations and violent reactions...for a time old and new rubbed shoulders
             -- and so did black and white -- in a manner that differed significantly
             from Jim Crow of the future or slavery of the past." (25, 26) In fact,
             Woodward argues, even Redemption didn't herald the onset of Jim Crow.
             While "it would certainly be preposterous to leave the impression that any
             the evidence I have submitted indicates a golden age of race relations in the
             period between Redemption and complete segregation," Woodward argues, "the
             era of stiff conformity and fanatical rigidity that was to come had not yet
             closed in and shut off all contact between the races, driven ...