Today is the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington "For Jobs and Freedom." So, to continue with the theme of Monday's post--concerning history/historians, activism, and civil rights--I excerpt below part of Sheldon Hackney's 2009 essay in Historically Speaking, "C. Vann Woodward, Dissenter."
Here Hackney discusses C. Vann Woodward's political outlook, civil rights work, and the parameters of dissent in the 1960s.
Hackney is the Boies Professor of U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the former president of the University of Pennsylvania (1981-1993) and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993-1997). He is the author of a variety of books and articles, including Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton University Press, 1969) and Magnolias without Moonlight: The American South from Regional Confederacy to National Integration (Transaction Publishers, 2005):
One of the most striking things about the young C. Vann Woodward was his affinity with dissent. It was not just his authorship of Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel, the book that launched his academic career in 1938, nor the fact that he approached W. E. B. DuBois earlier with hopes of writing about him, nor his toying with the notion of following his biography of Watson with one of Eugene Debs. Those are important indicators, but it is even more interesting that in every situation he found himself in during his early years, he gravitated toward the most progressive people and places–exploring Harlem when he was a Masters student at Columbia in 1931-32, getting involved in the Angelo Herndon Defense Committee when he was back in Atlanta teaching at Georgia Tech, hanging out at that den of left-wing conspirators, Ab's Book Store in Chapel Hill, when he was working on his Ph.D. and the Watson biography. He was sympathetic to the union organizing movement among cotton mill workers in North Carolina and met Glenn McLeod, who became his wife, because of those pro-union activities. As a young man, he made two trips to Europe, visiting the Soviet Union on both of them, revealing at least a curiosity about communism. When he was teaching at Scripps College, 1940-43, he helped defend a faculty colleague who was under attack for suspected fascist sympathies, an early indication of his devotion to free speech on campus. He was always where the political action was. . . .
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