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

A searing history of life under Jim Crow that recalls the bloodiest and most repressive period in the history of race relations in the United States--and the painful record of discrimination that haunts us to this day. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Been in the Storm So Long.

"The stain of Jim Crow runs deep in 20th-century America.... Its effects remain the nation's most pressing business. Trouble in Mind is an absolutely essential account of its dreadful history and calamitous legacy." --The Washington Post

In April 1899, Black laborer Sam Hose killed his white boss in self-defense. Wrongly accused of raping the man's wife, Hose was mutilated, stabbed, and burned alive in front of 2,000 cheering whites. His body was sold piecemeal to souvenir seekers; an Atlanta grocery displayed his knuckles in its front window for a week.

Drawing on new documentation and first-person accounts, Litwack describes the injustices--both institutional and personal--inflicted against a people. Here, too, are the Black men and women whose activism, literature, and music preserved the genius of the human spirit.