C. Vann Woodward

Born in Arkansas and educated at Emory University and the University of North Carolina, Woodward taught at Johns Hopkins and Yale universities, where he trained a generation of prominent historians. His seminal works, including Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951) and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), fundamentally challenged the prevailing narrative of Southern history by demonstrating that racial segregation was not an inevitable or ancient tradition but rather a relatively recent legal and social construction that emerged in the 1890s. Woodward's argument that "Jim Crow was not born but made" provided crucial intellectual ammunition for the civil rights movement, with Martin Luther King Jr. calling The Strange Career of Jim Crow "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." Throughout his career, Woodward emphasized the contingent nature of historical developments and argued against deterministic interpretations of the Southern past, earning him recognition as the dean of Southern historians and helping to reshape how Americans understood the relationship between race, law, and social change in the post-Reconstruction era.