His monumental 1980 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Been in the Storm So Long” examined in detail and with unusual sensitivity the freedmen’s response to emancipation. Litwack’s first book, “North of Slavery,” an elegant and path-breaking study of race relations in the North before the Civil War, demonstrated that blacks in the free states were segregated in “virtually every phase of existence” and that the Jim Crow system of systematically segregating blacks had been thoroughly established in the North long before it moved south. In doing so, Litwack has attempted to tackle perhaps the most morally compelling, emotionally charged, complicated and controversial subject that has engaged American historians over the last 45 years.įew historians are better prepared. “Trouble in Mind” chronicles the black experience in the American South–the most violent region in the country–during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the bloodiest and most repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States. Leon Litwack has written a terrifying book. 23 August 1998 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW
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