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Book Review
Canada and the United States
Leon F. Litwack. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. (A Borzoi Book.) New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1998. Pp. xxi, 599. $35.00.
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Fact by fact, quote by quote, story by story, Leon F. Litwack has built a monumental history of black southerners' survival and spiritual strength during the most intense years of Jim Crow, the period roughly between 1890 and 1915. Drawing on 102 archival collections and a vast array of published sources, Litwack describes a part of the American past that most contemporary white Americans refuse to acknowledge, or cannot imagine, or have reinvented to suit present needs. With unblinking eye, Litwack painstakingly shows southern whites unrelenting in their attention to the persecution and immiseration of black southerners. Drawing on the words of the most eloquent and the most plain spoken, the famous and the obscure, Litwack gives voice to black southerners' response to this campaign of destruction. He portrays their frustration and rage, their hopes and aspirations, and their struggles to make sense of lives so rigidly cast by the color line. Describing a world turned upside down, in which black achievers, not black slackers, were far more likely to be singled out by hawk-eyed white supremacists for violent castigation, Litwack has written a masterpiece of historical imagination. |
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