How long does it take to read The Strange Career of Jim Crow?
C. Vann Woodward
The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward takes about 3 hours 46 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 46 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1955. 205 pages, about 56,375 words.
8 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 6 hours 16 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 46 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 21 minutes |
The page count is the median across 12 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." The book offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, presenting evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s. Woodward convincingly shows that, even under slavery, the two races had not been divided as they were under the Jim Crow laws of the 1890s. In fact, during Reconstruction, there was considerable economic and political mixing of the races. The segregating of the races was a relative newcomer to the region. Hailed as one of the top 100 nonfiction works of the twentieth century, The Strange Career of Jim Crow has sold almost a million copies and remains, in the words of David Herbert Donald, "a landmark in the history of American race relations."
Subjects: African Americans, Segregation, Jim Crow, History, Race relations, Afro-Americans
