C. Vann Woodward, the most eminent and influential authority on southern history, died on December 17^th at age 91. A native of Arkansas, the son of a school principal and a Latin teacher, he was educated at Emory, Columbia, and UNC-Chapel Hill. After serving in the navy during World War II, he taught at Georgia Tech, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Virginia before joining the Yale history department in 1961. He retired from Yale in 1977.

Woodward received every major award and form of recognition the academic community can offer. He was elected president of the Southern Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the American Historical Association.

Over the long span of his distinguished career, he produced some of the most important works of southern history. His "Origins of the New South, 1877-1913" won the Bancroft Prize in 1952, and he received the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for "Mary Chesnut's Civil War." His other major works included "Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel" (1938), "Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction" (1951), "The Strange Career of Jim Crow" (1955), "The Burden of Southern History" (1960), "Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History" (1986), and "The Future of the Past" (1989).

Yet Woodward cannot be defined as simply a teacher and scholar. He was an articulate voice for progressive social change who punctured many of the romantic myths and illusions enshrouding southerners views of the past. In the process, he told us much about the racial tensions that have shaped and burdened the Souths development.

Take, for example, his best-selling book, "The Strange Career of Jim Crow." It was a compilation of lectures written after the Supreme Courts landmark decision to integrate the public schools in 1954. Woodward emphasized that legally mandated racial segregation in the South was not a long-standing and inviolable tradition, as its apologists claimed. It was a relatively new phenomenon.

For over a decade after the end of the Civil War, Woodward argued, blacks and whites in many southern states often mingled in public places without incident. It was not until the late 1880s that the rigid system of legal and political segregation became pervasive. Laws appeared in state after state requiring racially separate schools, restaurants, hospitals, orphanages, parks, railroad cars, and even public restrooms. To Woodward, the fact that widespread legal segregation emerged only at the end of the century was of great significance to Americans confronting Court-ordered integration in 1954. A prejudicial system of segregation that had been cobbled together in a few years, he stressed, could be more readily and peacefully dismantled.

While Woodwards optimism about a quick ending of segregation proved to be misplaced, his underlying message about the enduring effects of history in shaping the present proved to be poignantly accurate. He repeatedly highlighted the Souths history of defeat, poverty, and racism as defining the essence of Southernness. Not surprisingly, William Faulkner was Woodwards favorite novelist, and the historian often quoted Gavin Stevens, the lawyer in "Intruder in the Dust" who says: "The past is never dead. Its not even past."

As a son of the South, Woodward felt a keen sense of guilt for its violence and bigotry. While candidly recognizing his native regions "enduring value," he repeatedly urged his fellow southerners to confront their peculiar racial heritage and embrace the compromises needed to bridge their social divide. As he declared in 1964, "It would be a tragic decision to make intransigence and desperate adherence to a discredited code the test of southern loyalty." His observation still rings true.