The Strange Career of Jim Crow

King called it the historical bible of the civil rights movement, and the reason is its liberating thesis: segregation was not ancient and immovable but built at a particular time by particular choices, and therefore something that could be unmade. Woodward gave the movement a usable past, the knowledge that the system it fought was younger than it pretended and weaker than it looked. What men made, the book insists, men can remake.

The Southern historian who showed that segregation was not ancient and immovable but a system built at a particular time, by particular choices, and therefore one that could be unmade. The Strange Career of Jim Crow gave the civil rights movement a usable past. King called it the historical bible of the movement. Woodward's point was liberating: what was made by men can be remade by them.