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Rating: 
Summary: Authoritative and Informative
Review: In the wake of several books that have been published in recent years on the history of lynchings and Jim Crow, "Trouble in Mind" is by far the most thoroughly researched and most accessible. Leon F. Litwack explains Jim Crow in a personal and thought-provoking way, and manages to do so without giving us a dry history lesson. I've yet to read his Pulitzer Prize-winning "Been in the Storm So Long," but it is next on my list. If you're looking for a well-written book on a difficult and often misunderstood subject, I highly recommend Professor Litwack's "Trouble in Mind."
Rating:
Summary: Authoritative and Informative
Review: In the wake of several books that have been published in recent years on the history of lynchings and Jim Crow, "Trouble in Mind" is by far the most thoroughly researched and most accessible. Leon F. Litwack explains Jim Crow in a personal and thought-provoking way, and manages to do so without giving us a dry history lesson. I've yet to read his Pulitzer Prize-winning "Been in the Storm So Long," but it is next on my list. If you're looking for a well-written book on a difficult and often misunderstood subject, I highly recommend Professor Litwack's "Trouble in Mind."
Rating:
Summary: A white southerner says this book has been long needed
Review: It is probably out of print, but anyone horrified by "Trouble in Mind" must find a copy of "The History of Violence in America," by Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr. It is "A Report Submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence" (how quaint this all seems now). It is a Bantam Paperback, June, 1969. The period of Professor Litwack's wonderful book is pre-WW2. "Violence" will take you up to 1969, with accounts of the same stuff being done by "vigilante groups" and other such organizations, of course including the civil rights murders in the south.
Rating: 
Summary: A Massive Achievement
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A Massive Achievement
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A monumental account of the era of Jim Crow
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A troubling book
Review: Litwack's TROUBLE IN MIND clears up any doubt about what was going on in the segregated South. It wasn't just a matter of limited voting rights, separate schools and segregated neighborhoods. Violence was rampant (including torture, decapitation, castration and burning alive of blacks rumored to have committed rape against white women - a charge which seems comparable to the accusations of witchcraft in Salem in colonial times) and peonage & tenant farming - in which the debts of the farmers were almost always greater than the value of their crops! - in many cases replaced rural slavery as a means of forced labor (including return of run-aways) much as serfdom replaced, to some extent, slavery in the high middle ages in much of Western Europe. 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.
Rating:
Summary: A troubling book
Review: Litwack's TROUBLE IN MIND clears up any doubt about what was going on in the segregated South. It wasn't just a matter of limited voting rights, separate schools and segregated neighborhoods. Violence was rampant (including torture, decapitation, castration and burning alive of blacks rumored to have committed rape against white women - a charge which seems comparable to the accusations of witchcraft in Salem in colonial times) and peonage & tenant farming - in which the debts of the farmers were almost always greater than the value of their crops! - in many cases replaced rural slavery as a means of forced labor (including return of run-aways) much as serfdom replaced, to some extent, slavery in the high middle ages in much of Western Europe. 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.
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