A Fundamental Attack upon the Prevailing View: Launching The Strange Career of Jim Crow

Woodward had largely stuck to his vow to exercise scholarly restraint in his role as adviser to the NAACP legal team in the Brown case, resisting the impulse to join some of his colleagues in manipulating the meaning of what little evidence they could find to suggest that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment saw it precluding racially segregated public schools. In the end, he may have thought it just as well that the Justices had grounded their opinion, not in the findings of historians, but in what he called “sociological evidence” of the damaging social and emotional impact of