A memorial service will be held on Feb. 5 for C. Vann Woodward, a renowned Yale historian whose scholarship changed Americans' understanding of Southern history and influenced the nation's race relations.
Professor Woodward died Dec. 17 at his home in Hamden. He was 91 years old.
The service in his honor will be at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 5, in Battell Chapel, corner of Elm and College streets. All are welcome to attend.
Considered one of the century's most influential historians, Professor Woodward was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a staunch supporter of free speech. At Yale, where he taught from 1961 until his retirement in 1977, he helped create the University's policy on freedom of expression.
Professor Woodward's most significant contribution, however, "was a revolutionary transformation of our understanding of the history of American white supremacy," says his colleague and friend David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.
"Always writing with graceful and ironic prose, he undermined the strategic foundations of the racists' historical fortress and helped to reveal and reverse the fact that the South, despite its military defeat, had long been winning the ideological Civil War," Davis says.
In Professor Woodward's best-selling 1955 book, "The Strange Career of Jim Crow," the historian documented that segregation dated only to the 1880s and hence, was not a centuries-old tradition too engrained in the culture to be changed, as some proponents of segregation contended. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the book "the historical bible of the civil rights movement." The book, which was published in several revisions, has also been hailed by some critics as the single most influential volume ever written on the history of race relations in the United States. In 1999 -- nearly 45 years since it was published -- it sold its millionth copy and was ranked No. 70 on the Modern Library's list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction.
"Woodward not only transformed scholarly understanding of crucial areas in American history, but he also transformed Americans' perception of who they were," says Edmund S. Morgan, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History. "He probably did more than any other scholar to broaden the meaning of American commitment to human equality."
History professor Glenda E. Gilmore, also a specialist on the South, says that Professor Woodward paved the way for many other historians, and continues to influence the field.
"Although I did not know it at the time, when I was growing up in the South in the 1960s, his work gave people the courage to stand up for a more just way of life," Gilmore says. "Without that shift in Southern politics and the demise of overt white supremacy, I would have been incapable of even imagining the intellectual questions that engage me in the study of the Southern past. As it happened, my own work took up Professor Woodward's arguments from the point of view of African American women's politics. In completely rewriting Southern history, he hinted at questions that we are now answering in full, most often in support of his original conclusions."
Among Professor Woodward's other major books are a biography, written as his doctoral dissertation, titled "Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel" (1938); "Origins of the New South, 1877-1913" (1951), which won the Bancroft Prize; "The Burden of Southern History" (1960); "American Counterpoint" (1971); a memoir titled "Thinking Back" (1986); and "The Future of the Past" (1989). He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for editing "Mary Chestnut's Civil War," an account of the war drawn from the diaries and writings of a Southern woman.
Professor Woodward's books and other works were popular among historians and nonhistorians alike due to his talent as a storyteller, according to former Yale president and Sterling Professor Emeritus of History Howard R. Lamar.
"He made Southern history so clear and yet so dramatic, without overdoing it, that people read him gladly," says Lamar, a historian of the American West. "He had an incredible ability to find the right words. And while he is most known for his books, some of his best writings are his numerous book reviews and essays."
In 1973, Professor Woodward told the Yale Alumni Magazine (YAM) that he chose a career in history not because he had a strong interest in the field but because he fervently wanted to write, and the book he was interested in writing happened to be about a historical topic.
"I started the book, lost my job, and ran out of money," Professor Woodward explained in the YAM article. "The only way to continue work on the book was to become a candidate for a degree and convert the book into a dissertation. Since the subject of the book was historical, I applied for a degree in history. By cutting enough classes and flouting enough rules, I gained enough time and freedom to do the writing I wanted to do. It was a rather roundabout and backdoor approach to a career, but the basic motive seems sound enough in retrospect."
Throughout his career, Professor Woodward was the subject of many articles and profiles both in the national media and in publications by Yale students. In spite of his notoriety, however, the historian was always humble, says his close friend and colleague Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History.
"He was truly a great historian, yet even though he was very aware of how much he transformed his part of the historical landscape, he remained very modest," says Gay. "He was never ruined by his celebrity; in fact, he didn't think he was as well-known as he was."
Lamar says Professor Woodward's courteous and gentlemanly manner, as well as his "impeccable scholarship," put him in the "unique position" of being able to win the admiration of both those who favored and were against the integration of blacks and whites in American society, which Mr. Woodward advocated.
"He was respected by both friends and foes," says Lamar. "His scholarship raised him above arguments and views."
Comer Vann Woodward was born in 1908 in Vanndale, Arkansas, a town that was created by his ancestors, who were pre-Civil War slave owners. He and his family later moved to Morrilton, Arkansas. He earned his B.A. in philosophy in 1930 from Emory University, and then briefly taught freshman English at Georgia Tech and reviewed books for The Atlanta Journal. After returning from a tour of Europe in 1932, he helped raise money in support of a young black communist named Angelo Herndon, who had been arrested in Atlanta for leading a demonstration against welfare cuts.
Mr. Woodward earned his master's degree in political science at Columbia University in 1932 and returned to the South to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received his Ph.D. in history in 1937.
He taught briefly at the University of Florida and the University of Virginia before World II, then served in the war as a lieutenant in the Navy. He described some of his impressions of the war in his 1947 publication "The Battle for Leyte Gulf."
Professor Woodward taught at Johns Hopkins University from 1947 until he joined the Yale faculty. Throughout his long career in teaching, he nurtured numerous students who have since become noted historians, including three Pulitzer Prize-winners. His own long list of awards includes many honorary degrees and several prestigious fellowships, as well as the Gold Medal for History from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award.
During the 1970s, after a controversial speaker was prevented from speaking on campus, former Yale president Kingman Brewster asked Professor Woodward to chair a committee to define freedom of expression on campus. In the so-called "Woodward Report" of 1975, the hsitorian and the other committee members argued that even offensive, uncivil speech must be protected in an academic environment. Several years ago, another committee formed to reassess the issue of freedom of speech reaffirmed the conclusions of the Woodward Report.
More recently, the Yale historian made headlines during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, when Professor Woodward and some 400 other scholars signed a statement denouncing the impeachment effort. He and the other signers of the petition argued that President Clinton's dishonesty about his relationship with the White House intern did not constitute the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that the framers of the Constitution considered grounds for impeachment, and warned that impeaching Clinton would permanently damage the office of the presidency.
"It would be wrong to think of Professor Woodward only as a Southern historian because he was also someone who had a world view," says Lamar. "He kept up with people in all fields and enjoyed discussing diverse issues with them."
Professor Woodward was a member of many professional organizations. He served as president of the Southern Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, and as vice president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Professor Woodward was predeceased by his wife, the former Glenn Boyd MacLeod, and their son, Peter Woodward. His daughter-in-law, Susan Woodward, lives in London.
Memorial contributions can be made to the Peter Woodward Fund, c/o the Yale University Memorial Programs, P.O. Box 2038, New Haven, CT 06521.
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