Trouble in Mind (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Building on his Pulitzer Prize-winning study BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG: THE AFTERMATH OF SLAVERY (1979), Leon Litwack recounts the experiences of black Americans in the South during the heyday of racial segregation in TROUBLE IN MIND: BLACK SOUTHERNERS IN THE AGE OF JIM CROW. Litwack has done impressive research in the primary sources on black-white relations between 1877 and 1915, and he takes the reader back into a largely vanished world where whites exercised absolute power over their black population.

Rather than following the progress of segregation chronologically, Litwack looks at black life from the perspective of children growing up under the system, the role of education for African Americans, and the limits they encountered in the workplace. Some of his most harrowing chapters deal with the legal system in the South and the persistent threat of violence and lynching that shaped the everyday lives of black southerners.

Although the pain and suffering of African Americans in this period is evident on every page, Litwack’s book is not a study of victims. Instead, he shows the ways in which blacks in the South sought to preserve their humanity under desperate conditions. The blues refrains that give the book its pulse and drive demonstrate how folk poetry enabled blacks to endure years of oppression and bigotry. Few books could be more important for the contemporary dialogue on race than this moving account of how the promise of Reconstruction was lost and several generations of blacks in the South placed in daily fear of their lives. Litwack has written a classic work of American history that deserves the widest possible readership among citizens concerned with understanding how the nation reached its late-twentieth century state in race relations.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCIV, February 15, 1998, p. 974.

Choice. XXXVI, September, 1998, p. 201.

Kirkus Reviews. LXVI, February 15, 1998, p. 245.

Library Journal. CXXIII, February 1, 1998, p. 99.

The Nation. CCLXVI, May 11, 1998, p. 36.

The New York Times Book Review. CIII, May 3, 1998, p. 14.

Publishers Weekly. CCXLV, March 2, 1998, p. 47.

The Washington Post Book World. XXVIII, April 12, 1998, p. 3.