I just finished The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and unless I'm misunderstanding it, it seemed that though there was extreme racial tension, there wasn't segregation. That you could be on a steamer and whites and blacks would be mingling about. That it was the recession in the 1890s and the populist movement of the South scared the rich and powerful into adopting Jim Crow segregation into placating the more racist poorer people. This seems to be counter to the traditional notion of Civil War, Reconstruction, Deal of 1876, Union troops pull out, Jim Crow comes in. Am I mistaken in this understanding?
Woodward was a very important historian of the south. It's a very important, well-written book, and very inspiring in some ways- Martin Luther King loved it. But it had to be amended more than a few times- if you've got one from before 1974, it may be somewhat different than the last edition. Woodward found a lot of examples of Blacks working alongside Whites in the post-bellum South, cooperating, getting along with their lives. He did not make up those incidents. And there was indeed a violent period following the economic turbulence of the 1890's. There has always been a tendency in human societies, it seems, to find some good scapegoats when times get hard, pick out some people who, if they were put against the wall and shot, everything would be better. That definitely happened in the South: it was a time when the headquarters of the NAACP would hang out a flag that said " A Negro Was Lynched Today".
It's outside my field, but though I can't speak about whether that violence was actively implemented by an upper White elite trying to calm a restive lower class, I can say that , under criticism by David Hackett Fischer and others, Woodward later had to backtrack on his claims of Southern inter-racial cooperation made in the first edition. That cooperation existed at times, certainly. And, Woodward would have been right to say, more than in the North, which had an apartheid kind of racism that allowed Blacks more economic opportunity but kept them at a distance ( he once remarked that Northerners, when confronted over their own racism, liked to sing out, "Look away, look away, look away to Dixie Land!}. But it was much too hopeful to imply that equality came with that cooperation. Though Blacks might have warm relations with Whites, there was always a distinction, never a question as to who was in charge, who was calling the shots. That warmth was something like the warmth of the Nashville matron during the protests and lunch counter sit-ins of the early 1960's who asked, Why are the negroes making so much trouble? We have tried to take such good care of them.
David Hackett Fischer: Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought