Sheldon Hackney on C. Vann Woodward as Dissenter

Randall Stephens

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. . . .

The Late Historian Robert Zieger on the 1963 March on Washington

Randall Stephens

From Life magazine, September 6, 1963.

Across the US and around the globe people are marking the 50th anniversary of the "Jobs and Freedom" march on Washington, D.C.  Roughly 200,000 men and women, young and old, black and white gathered to demand justice and equality on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. 

Among the throng who came together around the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial were a collection of historians. (How interesting to think how this event so shaped the writing of those in attendance and many more who witnessed it from afar or learned of it years later.)  Some were soon-to-be historians or historians-in-training from the University of Maryland, Howard University, Johns Hopkins University, UVA, George Washington, and others. Among the many in attendance were Clayborne Carson, Dorothy Drinkard-Hawkshawe, and Robert Zieger. 

From Life magazine, September 6, 1963.

Zieger, who passed away this year, was Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Florida. He was a remarkable historian, mentor, and all-around mensch.  (Read Paul Ortiz's commemoration here on the blog.)  One of Zieger's last works was For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (University Press of Kentucky, 2007). Zieger wrote an essay about his experience of researching and writing the book in Historically Speaking. Here he also reflected on that day in August 1963 in D.C. Here's a brief excerpt from "Jobs and Freedom," Historically Speaking (May/June 2008):

Shortly after I had begun active work on [For Jobs and Freedom], historian John Bracey visited [the University of Florida] campus and gave a fascinating talk to students about the state of black history at the time he began graduate school at Northwestern in the early 1960s. It soon became apparent that Bracey and I were of a similar age. He recounted that in the initial syllabus for his 19th-century U.S. history seminar, there were no works by black scholars or, apart from works that dealt with slavery as a political problem, about the black experience in antebellum America. Bracey and a colleague, with the complete support of an abashed seminar director, soon rectified the omission. Bracey told this story as a way of indicating to his undergraduate student audience how far black history and race history had traveled in the four decades since.