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

This is an excellent book on learning what life was like for African American's during the Jim Crow era during the early twentieth century. Litwalk uses extensive excerpts from Afican American's living at the time enabling him to interpret very little. Litwack makes it very clear in the Preface what the purpose of writing this book is. The purpose of writing this book is to help readers understand that even though the Civil War ended in 1865 blacks condition was anything but equal to whites in the South, especially after reconstruction. Litwack says: "What the white South lost in the battlefields of Civil War and during Reconstruction, it would largely retake in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century...a new generation of black Southerners shared with survivors of enslavement a sharply prescribed and deteriorating position in a South bent on commanding black lives and black labor by any means necessary",(xiv). Litwack certainly achieved his purpose.

I picked up "Trouble In Mind" hoping it would be the kind of exhaustive and eloquent study of the Jim Crow South that has been needed for decades. I was not disappointed. This book goes to great lengths to document every facet of the black experience in the American South, the so-called "New South." It not only shows how a people struggled against unbelieveable injustice and violence, but endured. This must never be forgotten. Ever. Earlier reviews which call this book "revisionist" "biased" or "flawed" seem to have forgotten Litwack's admonition in the preface, that this book was not meant "to depict blacks only as victims or whites only as victimizers." But it also shows an unwillingness to believe that things of this nature could have happened in America. Unfortunately, they did, and this book is only a beginning. It must not be viewed as a sword of Damocles to be held over the head of every white, but as a beginning to understanding the very real work left to be done in this country between whites and blacks. I applaud Leon Litwack for his work.

Very few non-fiction books ever written in this country have been as astonishing,as factually solid, and as thoroughly disturbing. To read a book like this is to understand that there is something basically wrong with the way we have all been taught history. It isn't simply that we have never learned the entire history of segregation, of Jim Crow law, of lynchings, of post-Reconstruction (although we certainly haven't.) It's that our understanding of history has been sanitized beyond all recognition or resemblance to its true state. History as taught in schools is *perhaps* (and this is really being generous) comparable to five or six degrees ripped from a three hundred and sixty degree circle. Every once in a while, a book like one of Leon Litwack's comes along, and adds a liberal helping of degrees to our historical plates.

This book is revisionisim at its best. Dr. Litwack articulates the experience of blacks in the South with such depth that it becomes an inegral part of American History. A person seeking a challenge of old ideas must read this book.

It is probably out of print, but anyone horrified by "Trouble in Mind" must find a copy of "The History of Violence in America," by Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr. It is "A Report Submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence" (how quaint this all seems now). It is a Bantam Paperback, June, 1969. The period of Professor Litwack's wonderful book is pre-WW2. "Violence" will take you up to 1969, with accounts of the same stuff being done by "vigilante groups" and other such organizations, of course including the civil rights murders in the south.