Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow

by Leon Litwack

Summer vacations are a great time to get caught up on reading. I just returned from two weeks on a Texas lake where I read a number of mysteries including Nevada Barr's latest set within Carlsbad Caverns NP. Just before leaving, however, I finished Leon Litwack's latest titled "Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow." (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1998.) This book falls into the "must read" category for all of us dealing with Southern history from 1865 to 1920. Leon Litwack won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978 for "Been in the Storm So Long" on the ending of slavery, and he could very well win it again for this work.

C. Vann Woodward comments on the jacket that "This is the most complete and moving account we have had of what the victims of the Jim Crow South suffered and somehow endured."

The jacket goes on to describe "Trouble in Mind" this way. "In this sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Been in the Storm So Long, Leon F. Litwack constructs a searing, unforgettable account of life in the Jim Crow South. Drawing on a vast array of contemporary documents and firsthand narratives from both blacks and whites, he examines how black men and women learned to live with the severe restrictions imposed on their lives during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."

Divided into eight chapters titled; Baptisms, Lessons, Working, White Folks: Scriptures, White Folks: Acts, Hellhounds, Enduring, and Crossroads, this book chronicles the most striking legacy of the Civil War. Over the course of 496 pages, Litwack examines the period when the promise of emancipation clashed with the reality of unrestrained racism. "Litwack relates," again from the book jacket, "how black schools and colleges struggled to fulfill the expectations placed on them in a climate that was separate but hardly equal; how hardworking tenant farmers were cheated of their earnings, turned off their land, or refused acreage they could afford to purchase; how successful and ambitious blacks often became targets of white violence and harassment."

One leaves this book informed and bothered. The unfettered violence inflicted on black Americans during this period defies comprehension. Between 1890 and 1917 two to three black Southerners were hanged, burned at the stake, or murdered every week. Litwack portrays a South bent on establishing and maintaining white dominance over every aspect of black life. As the editor of the Atlanta Constitution expressed it in 1887, "The supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards--because the white race is the superior race."

"Trouble in Mind" will be the standard work on this period for years to come. It should be on the reading list and in the libraries of all NPS employees studying, interpreting, and managing historic properties even remotely related to the time and place portrayed here. The Jim Crow era represents both the consequence of the Civil War and the failure of this country to enforce basic constitutional rights to large numbers of American citizens. With the historical context presented here, we gain a much clearer appreciation of the achievements of Booker T. Washington or the challenges faced by Maggie Walker or race relations at places like Cane River Creole. This is a book that should/will inform education programs at our sites for some time.

Read! Enjoy! Learn!

Dwight T. Pitcaithley

Chief Historian

Ted Fitts writes:

The July20/27 issue of The New Republic has a very interesting cover story about Bill McKibben's new book. The author, Margaret Talbot, doesn't much care for his view of nature nor for him, and cites our friend, William Cronon's "The Trouble with Wilderness" by way of criticizing McKibben.