His book The Strange Career of Jim Crow demonstrated that racial segregation was an invention of the late 19th century rather than an inevitable post-Civil-War development.

After receiving his master's degree in 1932, Woodward worked for the defense of Angelo Herndon, a young African-American Communist Party member who had been accused of subversive activities.

Woodward's dissertation director was Howard K. Beale, a Reconstruction specialist who promoted the Beardian economic interpretation of history that deemphasized ideology and ideas and stressed material self-interest as a motivating factor.

[5] He picked Georgia politician Tom Watson, who in the 1890s was a populist leader focusing the anger and hatred of poor whites against the establishment, banks, railroads and businessmen.

Watson in 1908 was the presidential candidate of the Populist Party, but this time was the leader in mobilizing the hatred of the same poor whites against blacks, and a promoter of lynching.

[6][7] Woodward's most influential book was The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), which explained that segregation was a relatively late development and was not inevitable.

After the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, in spring 1954, Woodward gave the Richards Lectures at the University of Virginia.

[8] Popular myth holds that Martin Luther King Jr. called The Strange Career "the historical Bible of the Civil Rights Movement" in a speech at Montgomery, Alabama on March 23, 1956, though he did not do so; he did cite the book and aver that it proved racial segregation was "a political stratagem", in King's words, and not a natural state of American society.

Finally the 1890s saw white southerners "capitulate to racism" to create "legally prescribed, rigidly enforced, state-wide Jim Crowism.

He insisted on the discontinuity of the era and rejected both the romantic antebellum popular images of the Lost Cause school and the overoptimistic business boosterism of the New South Creed.

[15] He directed 25 PhD dissertations, including those by In 1974, the United States House Committee on the Judiciary asked Woodward for an historical study of misconduct in previous administrations and how the Presidents responded.

Woodward led a group of fourteen historians, and they produced a 400-page report in less than four months, Responses of the Presidents to Charges of Misconduct.

"[18] The British historian Michael O'Brien, the editor of Woodward's letters in 2013, says that by the 1970s He became greatly troubled by the rise of the black power movement, disliked affirmative action, never came to grips with feminism, mistrusted what came to be known as "theory," and became a strong opponent of multiculturalism and "political correctness.

"[19]In 1969, as president of the American Historical Association, Woodward led the fight to defeat a proposal by New Left historians to politicize the organization.

"[20] In 1975–76 Woodward led the unsuccessful fight at Yale to block the temporary appointment of the communist historian Herbert Aptheker to teach a course.