Cheap Trouble in Mind (Book) (LEON F. LITWACK, Leon F Litwack) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Trouble in Mind

A white southerner says this book has been long needed
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.

---

Authoritative and Informative
In the wake of several books that have been published in recent years on the history of lynchings and Jim Crow, "Trouble in Mind" is by far the most thoroughly researched and most accessible. Leon F. Litwack explains Jim Crow in a personal and thought-provoking way, and manages to do so without giving us a dry history lesson. I've yet to read his Pulitzer Prize-winning "Been in the Storm So Long," but it is next on my list. If you're looking for a well-written book on a difficult and often misunderstood subject, I highly recommend Professor Litwack's "Trouble in Mind."

---

A troubling book
Litwack's TROUBLE IN MIND clears up any doubt about what was going on in the segregated South. It wasn't just a matter of limited voting rights, separate schools and segregated neighborhoods. Violence was rampant (including torture, decapitation, castration and burning alive of blacks rumored to have committed rape against white women - a charge which seems comparable to the accusations of witchcraft in Salem in colonial times) and peonage & tenant farming - in which the debts of the farmers were almost always greater than the value of their crops! - in many cases replaced rural slavery as a means of forced labor (including return of run-aways) much as serfdom replaced, to some extent, slavery in the high middle ages in much of Western Europe.

The book aptly recounts how, post-Reconstruction, white supremacists, often through fraud (although, this would seem unnecessary where the majority population is white and accepting Litwack's assumption that most Southerners opposed black rights), were able to take control of the State governments and enact new Constitutional provisions which provided limitations on the right to vote - including poll taxes and arbitrary information tests. Of great interest is the way in which, via bribery and the client-patron system, the Democratic party began pulling black votes away from the Republicans. In addition, segregation and anti-miscegnation laws were passed starting in the 1880s.

Litwack also argues that black responses to white oppression led to general hatred of whites by blacks - and to black nationalism. Curiously, the use of black pride and solidarity was also used by the black upper class to encourage blacks to only shop at black-owned businesses - thereby helping the black upper class (curiously, the black middle-class' aversion to racial violence, we are led to believe, was often personal rather than based on racial solidarity - one biracial woman even being quoted as only caring because wealthy blacks were often the targets). The book finishes off with the GREAT MIGRATION and the finding of racial prejudice in the North.

Although an excellent study, the book does suffer from some deficiencies. Litwack would have been better off if he had read Ira Berlin's MANY THOUSANDS GONE and similar works regarding early racial intermixing rather than leave us with the implication that almost all biracial persons were the descendants of rapes of black women by white men. Exaggeration of the difference between the status of poor whites and poor blacks is also evident - for example, my grandfather (who was white) was also a poor tenant farmer and my father (who made it to the 8th grade) went much farther than many of his siblings in education. In addition, there is a tendency to generalize about whites and cast them as either violent racists or patronizing liberal racists. There also tends to be a pattern of stating a thesis, giving an example, restating the thesis, giving a second example, then restating the thesis again and giving a 3rd example as a way to direct the thought processes of the reader. Notable, too, is the reliance on "popular stories."

This being said, this book is still enlightening and should be required reading in high schools.