Trouble in Mind
In 1889, the student newspaper at Fisk, a black university in Nashville, predicted a major shift in race relations in the post-Reconstruction South. To its thinking, a new generation of Negroes had emerged, less patient and fearful than before. This, in turn, had bred a new generation of whites, "even more hostile and bitter than the older ones." The South was moving toward confrontation, it appeared, and there was no turning back. "We are not the Negro from whom the chains of slavery fell a quarter of a century ago," the newspaper claimed, "most assuredly not" (p. 422). This prediction proved accurate-and the consequences severe. The decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a dramatic rise in racial violence and repression throughout the South. Trouble in Mind continues the narrative begun in Leon Litwack's previous book, Been in the Storm So Long, which followed the lives of black Southerners during the years of Civil War and Reconstruction. The earlier book employed a mountain of evidence to capture the determination of former slaves seeking to exercise their liberty in meaningful ways. The new book tells a far bleaker story. Some scholars may be disappointed. In place of statistics-there is not a single chart or graph in this 599-page book-one finds folktales, church hymns, blues songs, prison records, oral histories, scrapbooks, private diaries, newspaper accounts, and assorted public records. There are no disputes with fellow historians, no grand theories about the hardening of segregation, the impact of industrialization, the promise-and failure-of reform movements such as populism. What Litwack has produced is a riveting, "bottoms up" account of people who worked and struggled in relative obscurity. A graceful writer with an eye for the perfect quote, the telling anecdote, he purposely steps aside to allow his subjects, wherever possible, to speak for themselves. The result is an elegant panorama of black southern life, adding fresh detail and perspective to a depressingly familiar story.