He makes some claims which seem dubious, like in his history of Jim Crow he says that the North invented Jim Crow laws and that black and white city dwellers in the South would share neighborhoods, jobs, and even quarters before the Civil War. Given that he marched with MLK I'm guessing he isn't making these claims as apologetics for Southern pride, but do we have a lot of evidence to support this?
I was kinda hoping someone really in this field would jump in here with a really big response. But this does deserve an answer, so I'll do my best.
It is quite true that whites and blacks would often live and work in close proximity in the South, much closer than in the North. It is also quite true that there was a violent change after 1890, that resulted in lynchings and lots of Jim Crow laws. And it is true that there were periods and places in the ante-bellum South in which there seemed to be - seemed- a peaceful coexistence. When Jim Crow was first published, it was seized upon by a lot of Lost Cause sympathizers in the South to show that, yes, we once got along just fine down here. However, it is very hard to find any evidence in the ante-bellum period that Southern whites ( or many Northern ones) regarded blacks as equals , deserving equal rights. Woodward got plenty of criticism for this . Especially in the tense 1850's, there were laws restricting slaves in great detail: how far from home a slave could be allowed to walk, how long he could wait by the public well, requirements that all slaves away from home have notes from their masters. The John Brown raid at Harper's Ferry created a widespread panic among Southern whites . There was clearly always an underlying fear of a slave revolt. The constant Southern claims that slaves were happy and contented and treated as well as they deserved were hollow. There always had to be at least a threat of violence in order to make the system work, whether it was the whip on the plantation or fist fights and duels with Abolitionists in Congress.
Woodward was a good historian in many ways. He spent a lot of time with his sources and wrote very well. He was also a Southern sympathizer, and his marching with MLK could be seen as an example of that- MLK, after all, was also a Southerner. He was indignant that the North would try to hide its own racism by directing people to "look away, look away, look away to Dixie Land". But ( in my own limited opinion) in his notion that later Jim Crow laws were evidence for an earlier South that was kinder and gentler he was being hopeful. In reading his book, I was reminded of the old adage about the different kinds of racism: in the South, someone black could be close, but couldn't get big. In the North, someone black could be big, but couldn't be close ( U.S. Grant would propose, after becoming President, that all the freed slaves be sent to what's now the Dominican Republic) . Either way, racial discrimination was part of the US, North and South, before the Civil War and after.