May 3, 1998
An American Nightmare
A heartbreaking history of segregation and its target population.
First Chapter: 'Trouble in Mind'
By EDWARD L. AYERS
TROUBLE IN MIND
Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow.
By Leon F. Litwack.
Illustrated. 599 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
t was exactly a century ago this year that Sam Hose left his home in rural Georgia for Atlanta. A literate and hard-working black man needing money to help care for his ill mother and his mentally retarded brother, Hose ended up laboring for a white landlord on a plantation outside the city. In the spring of the next year, the two had a falling out over wages. The white man threatened the black man with a pistol and the black man defended himself with the ax he was using to chop wood. Hose accidentally killed his employer and fled to his mother's cabin.
The white-owned newspapers of the South had long gorged themselves with exaggerated or fabricated accounts of such violence. In the papers' version, the fight between Sam Hose and his boss became transformed into the most enraging crime of all: the rape of the white man's wife. White Georgians tracked Hose down and prepared for his lynching. Two thousand people gathered for the killing, some taking a special excursion train from Atlanta for the purpose. The leaders of the lynching stripped Hose, chained him to a tree, stacked wood around him, and soaked everything in kerosene. The mob cut off Hose's ears, fingers and genitals; they peeled the skin from his face. They watched, a newspaper reported, ''with unfeigning satisfaction'' as the man's veins ruptured from the heat and his blood hissed in the flames. ''Oh, my God! Oh, Jesus,'' were the only words Hose could manage. When he finally died, the crowd cut his heart and liver from his body, sharing the pieces among themselves, selling fragments of bone and tissue to those unable to attend. No one wore a disguise, no one was punished. Subsequent investigation showed that Hose had never even entered the white home, much less committed a rape there.
W. E. B. Du Bois, then a professor at Atlanta University, had prepared ''a careful and reasoned statement'' on the case. But as he carried it to the newspaper office he learned of the lynching and heard that he would be passing a grocery store displaying Hose's knuckles in a jar. He turned around, too disheartened to continue. Booker T. Washington, anointed by whites as the leader of his race, composed a letter of protest, but threw it away and finally refused to offer any comment at all. A black Presbyterian missionary in Liberia told the Africans among whom he lived about the lynching, but they could not believe such an event had occurred. ''Their imagination had never pictured any tragedy so frightful or revolting,'' he wrote. Black troops fighting insurgents in the Philippines found leaflets published by the Filipinos that told the Americans about the Sam Hose lynching, asking how they could be willing to die for such a country. A black man in New Orleans, Robert Charles, already furious at the brutality against Hose, was assaulted by white police officers with no provocation. He ended up shooting 27 whites, killing seven, including four policemen, before he himself died in a gun battle.
These events of generations ago, when the nation stood on the cusp of a new century, shape much of ''Trouble in Mind,'' Leon F. Litwack's portrayal of the American South between Reconstruction and World War I. It is a nightmare world, full of distorted shapes, muffled screams and swallowed anger. It is a world in which whites and blacks wage undeclared war, in which violence throbs as a constant threat and daily reality. It is a place of brutal assault on black humanity, with only Christian faith relieving the suffering. Black leaders stand impotent before the onslaught. White people blur into one horrifying mass.
In a sense, Litwack began this project in 1961 when he published ''North of Slavery,'' a landmark study of black Americans in the North before the Civil War. Many of the forms of discrimination identified with the Jim Crow South, Litwack showed, had long been prefigured in the Northern states; America's struggles with race were, and had always been, a national burden. His 1979 book, ''Been in the Storm So Long,'' shifted the story to the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, offering a rich account of the process by which black people made themselves free. It justly won a Pulitzer Prize.
''Trouble in Mind'' picks up the story at the end of Reconstruction, when black political power was shattered by what whites called ''Redemption,'' the return of white Southern control. Whereas Litwack's Reconstruction book chronicled the efflorescence of freedom, the new volume tells the somber tale of decline and repression from these hopeful beginnings. This era, in which black disfranchisement and full-scale segregation came into being, in which new dreams of citizenship and freedom died an early and bitter death, was the most harrowing period of African-American life since slavery itself -- the nadir, the pioneering black historian Rayford Logan called it decades ago. The word is fitting. Litwack's is a heartbreaking book about a heartbreaking time.
Litwack employs a plain style. He has no room for theory or even for an argument that goes much beyond what the quotations themselves tell us. He offers a direct and straightforward explanation for the state of affairs in the New South. Whites ''owned the land, the law, the police, the courts, the government, the armed forces and the press.'' The political system ''denied blacks a voice; the educational system denied them equal access and adequate resources; popular culture mocked their lives and aspirations; the economic system left them little room for ambition or hope; and the law and the courts functioned effectively at every level to protect, reinforce and deepen their political powerlessness, economic dependence and social degradation.''
Litwack does not enter into any of the long-running historical debates over the causes of segregation, the origins of disfranchisement or the roots of black poverty, but he generally de-emphasizes the possibilities for positive change that other students of this period have strained to see: labor unions open to black involvement, a Populist movement that challenged white solidarity, impressive growth in black literacy and property holding. His emphasis on powerlessness and dependence differs from that of many influential recent accounts of race in 19th-century America. Those studies describe interracial contacts as an unrelenting negotiation in settings ranging from the family to the workplace to the sidewalk to the dance hall to the ballot box. They stress the economic, familial and institutional success of significant numbers of Southern black men and women despite the ever-tightening web of segregation. They stress the effort whites exerted to persuade themselves that they were justified in their dominion.
The time and place described by Litwack were tumultuous, marked by constant upheaval. Other historians have pointed out that even lynching had a history: it began in certain decades, peaked in particular years and went into decline, replaced with other forms of repression. After the Sam Hose outrage Du Bois regained his resolve and became ever more politically active; after brutal riots in North Carolina and Georgia, many in the growing black middle class turned their backs on Booker T. Washington. Even as the great migration took many talented and energetic black Southerners to the North, those who remained in the South never ceased their struggle or their accomplishment. The civil rights movement was accomplished by the black people of the South, by the children and grandchildren of the people chronicled in ''Trouble in Mind.''
This book's final sentences bring Litwack back to the North, where he began his monumental labor four decades ago. Describing the years during and after World War I, he speaks wearily of the constancies in American life. ''In places such as Chicago and New York, Pittsburgh and Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia, black migrants came to learn that racial privilege knew no Mason-Dixon line. Nor did racial privilege always manifest itself in lynchings, Jim Crow, disfranchisement and peonage. It was all very different, and it was very much the same. It was a different America, and it was a familiar America.''
Edward L. Ayers's most recent book is ''The Oxford Book of the American South: Testimony, Memory, and Fiction.''
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