Customer Reviews

Trouble in Mind

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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.

Leon Litwack's book offers perhaps one of the most lucid and thorough descriptions of life under Jim Crow. By the time you turn the final page, it will be clear that Jim Crow is about far more than signs over drinking fountains. Rather, it was a systemic attempt to re-impose white supremacy after the yoke of slavery had been cast off. Despite others' criticisms, I found Litwack's evidence more than compelling. As a student of history, I must say that his coverage was complete, and his analysis was accurate. Trouble in Mind depends upon a wide variety of sources, including mainstream, white, periodicals. Perhaps what is most disturbing is that many of the primary-source documents are from mainstream, "white" sources.

Leon F. Litwack has assembled a massive book, Trouble in Mind, that will take the reader through the entire life of African Americans living under the Jim Crow laws in the South. All the stories are taken from original sources that allow the authentic voices of the African Americans to heard whether in protest, agony, prayer, sadness, sympathy, anger, or the range of other emotions pouring out from this book and their stories. Many of the voices recur throughout the book and become very familiar to the reader. The book is designed so as to take the reader from childhood under Jim Crow until death and having those familiar voices appearing throughout the book does add a horrifying element of the seeing how the Jim Crow laws and racial attitudes in the South were all encompassing and affected a person's entire life. It does help if the reader has a familiarity with the history of this period to truly understand the stories in this book. It is a fine work that allows the voices of African Americans to speak out about the times they lived through.

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 is one of those books that's both tough to read and tough to put down. It's tough to read because you don't want to believe that such a large group of people in our country were capable of inflicting such physical and mental suffering for any reason, let alone skin color. But it's hard to put down because it's interesting, informative and well written, and because I was drawn to how the southern blacks coped and developed different aspects of their culture during this time.

The book covers the Jim Crow-era South, from the 1880s until about the start of World War I. Litwack's research is tremendous, as he details many aspects of life in the South during this time. The chapter on lynching is heartbreaking and infuriating. I was captivated by sections on the development of blues music, Jack Johnson and the impact of the black churches. You'll find yourself shaking your head often while reading the book and rooting on people like the domestic servant who urinated in her boss's coffee.

Litwack is redundant at times in this book. It's readable in the sense that it's written clearly and well, and I have no problems with him telling multiple examples of lynchings and other mistreatments. These are integral. But he does make certain points over and over, especially in some of the middle chapters.

The book is not for everyone because it's very, very detailed and awfully heavy. It's a history book, not a narrative. I think everyone should be made aware of the main ideas of this book, but as for reading it in its entirety, I'd say it's primarily for history teachers, students and buffs.

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.

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.

awful times, how did they survive? jim crow is america's nuremberg laws that have been virtually erased from the collective memory. my grandparents lived this life. took me a long time to finish it; i had to keep putting it down: a hard read and worth it.

Leon Litwack has done it again, combining impeccable writing with serious scholarship and insight. Trouble in Mind is a must read for those who are serious about understanding the inner workings of Jim Crow-ism and its impact upon generations of southern blacks who endured its hate-driven tyranny. Litwack's treatment of the subject is genuine, authoritative and balanced. An excellent and compelling read.Trouble in Mind

More than once when I was immersed in this book ("reading" does not do justice to the experience) I thought of Thomas Jefferson's quote: I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

I agree with previous reviewers that this is a must-read book to help get an understanding of the effects of Jim Crow on life in the South. A couple reviewers noted that the author doesn't do justice to the whites in the south who did not go along with the racist system. I suggest that that was not the purpose of the book.

Litwack wanted to give an understanding of what the experience was like for Blacks living under Jim Crow legal and extralegal conditions. Any possible non-racist experiences at the hands of a white person would not in any way alter the day to day existence for Blacks: they lived in pervasive fear not knowing what might set off some white person and end in the death of a Black person. For more than a decade there averaged one lynching a week. This was in addition to the killing of Blacks by other means or the Blacks who suddenly disappeared.

With slavery abolished (and Black people no longer valuable property) it became literally open season on killing Blacks. The author uses anecdotal accounts and lots quotes to show what this meant to Blacks trying to work, get ahead, raise their family, participate in a community.

The chapters that deal with lynching are the most chilling. Heart breaking too are the catch 22 situations visited upon Blacks. Whites justified their supremacy by maintaining that Blacks didn't have what it takes (smarts, perseverance, etc.) to be successful and then not only kept Blacks from opportunities to better themselves (education, fair wages, business opportunities) but also deliberately, in cold-blood took away what property an achieving Black might accumulate. Arson was a favorite method but out-right murder worked too.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants a sense of how life for Blacks in the south was systematically circumscribed in service to the ideology of White Supremacy. It is very very readable (that is, not written as a boring old history book).

I also take away an appreciation of how methodically established was the system of intimidation, oppression, and violence. The South wasn't a place of casual bigotry. Litwack provides ample quotations by whites as they explain, maintain, and justify the characteristics of their racist society. The lack of shame would be stunning except such deep immorality has no shame.

It's a mere 150 years since the start of the Civil War. A hundred years ago Jim Crow was in full sway. How does the South see Blacks nowadays, treat Blacks now? After reading Trouble in Mind I'm not sanguine that the deep racism that has characterized the South is easily put by.