Trouble in mind : Black southerners in the age of Jim Crow /

This is a magisterial work by arguably one of the finest scholars of the African American experience. The book is a long-awaited sequel to Litwack's Pulitzer Prize-winning Been in the Storm So Long (CH, Nov'79), which detailed southern blacks' adjustment to freedom in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. By the later 1870s the noble attempt at biracial democracy had failed. Litwack's focus here is on that first generation of southern African Americans born in freedom but faced with the onerous reestablishment of white rule and segregation, popularized by the phrase "Jim Crow." Trouble in Mind takes the story through "the Great Migration" of southern blacks to the North during and immediately after WW I. The work is both a sweeping narrative history of the period and a close examination of the day-to-day struggle blacks faced in maintaining personal dignity and identity in a hostile social, economic, legal, and political environment. Litwack makes liberal use of oral history, hitherto unpublished accounts, and pertinent secondary literature. Photographs. Highly recommended for all levels. K. Edgerton Montana State University at Billings

In his Pulitzer Prize^-winning Been in the Storm So Long (1979), historian Litwack drew on Depression-era oral histories of ex-slaves to recapture the experience of African Americans the U.S. Constitution defined as property until the Civil War and finally recognized as citizens under the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. In Trouble in Mind, he blends archival material, research from a new generation of historians, and blues lyrics' often powerful glimpses of a way of life in a wide-ranging portrait of yet another generation of African Americans--those born after the war and Reconstruction, who had to learn the rigorous strictures of Jim Crow or, ultimately, escape the South in the great migration. Most nonsoutherners who know only cliches about this troubled period will be enlightened by Litwack's thorough descriptions, studded with contemporary citations, of both the fear and the violence that underlay Jim Crow and the notable success of African Americans in the southern states in building and preserving strong families, schools, and other institutions. --Mary Carroll

A sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Been in the Storm So Long. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The expansive sequel to Litwack's Pulitzer-winning Been in the Storm So Long (1979) touches all the bases of southern African-American life during the period he calls Žthe nadir of black life.Ž Any recounting of the years between the dismantling of Reconstruction's reforms in the 1870s and the migration to northern cities that commenced with WW IŽis necessarily preoccupied with white power. That's because southern whites, through Jim Crow laws and violence, controlled every aspect of black life. Just how extensive, demeaning, and abhorrent was white repression is made painfully, abundantly clear by the testimony of the ``common'' blacks Litwack quotes. Their testimony details white resistance to black progress in every conceivable endeavor, from social interaction to education, work, justice, even which games of chance blacks could play (craps was OK; pokerŽ``a white man's game''Žwas not). Jim Crow's more absurd contortions (the existence of separate courtroom Bibles for swearing in black and white witnesses; a request for separate gallows for condemned prisoners) would seem pathetic but for the sadistic violence that backed them. A chapter on lynching features the tale of Sam Hose, a black laborer who murdered his white boss in self-defense. Wrongly accused of raping the man's wife, Hose was mutilated, stabbed, and burned alive in front of 2,000 cheering whites. His body was sold piecemeal to souvenir seekers; an Atlanta meat market displayed his knuckles in its front window for a week. Such brutality, Litwack notes, was regularly perpetrated by the South's ``best'' citizens in the name of curbing black savagery. Despite the totality of white domination, one wishes Litwack had responded more thoroughly to black subornation of white power. Still, by gathering these disparate voices together, he makes an invaluable contribution to the written record of this country's most reprehensible moral outrage. (8 photos, not seen)