Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow [Paperback]

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.