Book Review

The history of the South in the age of Jim Crow may have more to tell the United States about its tragic racial past and enduring racial dilemma than that of any other period, yet it remains among the least understood. The historical literature on African Americans from the diaspora to Reconstruction is rich, nuanced, and widening. The same can be said of our expanding view of the Second Reconstruction, where works such as John Dittmer's Local People (1994) and Charles Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom (1995) have taken us far beyond the television cameras and the civil rights celebrities to the roots of the freedom movement in the culture of the rural black South. Between reconstructions, however, the story remains murky. Despite some landmark state and local studies—Neil McMillen's Dark Journey (1989) and Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore's Gender and Jim Crow (1996) spring to mind—it was not until Leon F. Litwack's Trouble in Mind that any scholar dared a comprehensive overview of the South's apartheid years.	1
Litwack stands among the first rank of historians of the African American saga. His 1979 classic, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery may be the best overview of the coming of freedom that we will ever see. Trouble in Mind only adds to his stature. Its horrifying collage unveils "how the first generations born in freedom, more questioning of their 'place,' and less inclined to render absolute deference to whites, encountered (and in a certain sense helped to provoke) the most violent and repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States." Its chief strengths are its riveting prose and unblinking clarity about the mundane brutality of Jim Crow life.	2
Although Trouble in Mind runs almost five hundred pages, it is an extraordinarily effective book for teaching college students, and it is sure to reach a broader reading public. It will win prizes and deserve them. Litwack's eye for telling detail, his taut prose, and his dozens of gripping anecdotes make the bitter realities of the Jim Crow age come to life for a generation distant from this history. Litwack goes beyond the legal niceties of segregation to convey the vicious everyday dynamics of white domination. He understands, for example, the perils of prosperity in a world where painting his house could cost a black man his life, a world in which a black family would desperately hide the fact that they owned a piano. His many stories of lynching are vivid, insightful, and poignant; they literally brought tears to the eyes of our students. As a narrative voice, Litwack offers an important model not merely for scholars in African American or southern history but for all historians.	. . .