Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow

The name of the era, "Jim Crow," was somehow derived from an old minstrel song, but there was nothing frivolous about the laws and traditions used to keep blacks from participating in society in the post-Reconstruction South. Leon Litwack, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a noted authority on black history, has written a searing account of the age of Jim Crow in Trouble In Mind. The book is arranged in thematic chapters that show how blacks were restricted at every turn. Blacks were kept in perpetual debt, denied proper schooling, and were subjected to daily assaults on their dignity. Most disturbing was the institution of lynchings, the thousands of hangings and burnings that terrorized blacks in the South. Litwack documents how lynchings were carefully planned and attracted large crowds who viewed them as cathartic entertainment. Trouble In Mind deals with a long and sad chapter in American History, but Professor Litwack has written a laudable book which deserves to be read. Trouble In Mind is considered a sequel to Litwack's Been In the Storm So Long, a critically acclaimed account of Reconstruction which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History.