Leon Litwack

Leon F. Litwack (born December 2, 1929) is an American historian whose scholarship focuses on slavery, the Reconstruction Era of the United States, and its aftermath into the 20th century. He won a National Book Award,^[1] the Pulitzer Prize,^[2] and the Francis Parkman Prize for his 1979 book, Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

After the Spring 2007 semester, he retired to emeritus status at the University of California Berkeley, where he received the Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Teaching that year. Then he went on a lecture tour that led to his latest book, How Free Is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow (2009).

Biography

Litwack was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1929, and received his B.A. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1958 from the University of California, Berkeley.^[3] He has taught at the Universities of Wisconsin and South Carolina and at Colorado College.

Litwack's interest in history was sparked by The Growth of the American Republic, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager. Litwack said, "The textbook was my first confrontation with history. I asked my 11th grade teacher for the opportunity to respond to the textbook’s version of Reconstruction, to what I thought were distortions and racial biases. (I had already read Howard Fast’s Freedom Road.) The research led me to the library—and to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, with that intriguing subtitle: An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. Armed with that book, I presented what I thought to be a persuasive rebuttal of the textbook."^[4]

Historian Michael Les Benedict wrote that, in 1961, "Leon Litwack showed how the federal government's pervasive support for slavery led to shameful treatment of free African Americans." Benedict was referring to pages 30–63 of chapter 2, titled "The Federal Government and the Free Negro" in Litwack's book, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860.^[5]

From 1964 to 2007, Litwack taught at the University of California in Berkeley, where he became the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History. He instructed more than 30,000 students.^[4] For much of that time, he taught the introductory course in post-Civil War American History. He gave his final lecture as a professor, "Fight the Power", on Monday, May 7, 2007 in Wheeler Auditorium.^[6]

Litwack was elected to the presidency of the Organization of American Historians. An enormously popular and influential teacher, he was profiled in Newsweek's 2006 edition of the "Giving Back Awards", having been nominated by one of his former students.^[7] He has received two distinguished teaching awards.^[4] Litwack was presented with the Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Teaching in 2007 by the ASUC at the University of California, Berkeley.^[8]

With a (National Endowment for the Humanities) NEH Film Grant, he produced To Look for America in 1971.

Been in the Storm So Long was a groundbreaking book on Reconstruction, published in 1979. It won the annual Pulitzer Prize for History^[2] and Francis Parkman Prize; next year its first paperback edition won a National Book Award.^{[1][lower-alpha 1]}

Years later he continued the investigation of race relations to the early 20th century with Trouble in Mind (1998). In turn, the sequel to Trouble^[9] is How Free Is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures), which focuses on black southerners and race relations from the 1930s to 1955.

A distinguished lecturer with the Organization of American Historians, Litwack lectures on these topics:

• Pearl Harbor Blues: Black Americans and World War II
• Trouble in Mind: African Americans and Race Reflections from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement
• On Becoming a Historian
• To Look for America: From Hiroshima to Woodstock (an impressionistic multi-media examination of American society, with an introductory lecture on American society after 1945)
• Fight the Power: Black Americans and Race Relations after the Civil Rights Movement ^[9]

Selected works

Books

• North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 1961)
• The American Labor Movement by Leon Litwack (1962) ISBN 0-671-62827-5
• Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. (1979) —winner of the National Book Award^[1] and the Pulitzer Prize for History^[2]
• Trouble In Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)
• Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, edited by Hilton Als, Jon Lewis, Leon F. Litwack and James Allen (Twin Palms Publishers, 2000) ISBN 0-944092-69-1
• The Harvard Guide to African-American History, edited by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Darlene Clark Hine and Leon F. Litwack (Harvard Univ Press, 2001) ISBN 0-674-00276-8 — compiles information and interpretations on the past 500 years of African American history, containing essays on historical research aids, bibliographies, resources for women's issues, and an accompanying CD-ROM providing bibliographical entries
• How Free Is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow. The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures (Harvard University Press, 2009) ISBN 978-0-674-03152-4

Film

• To Look for America (1971)

Quotations

"So what else is there to say but that everything has changed and nothing has changed. And Fight the Power. And 'Go Bears!' " – concluding his final lecture, May 7, 2007

Notes

References

• Leon Litwack profile at SFGate.com (includes photo)

v t e Pulitzer Prize for History (1976–2000) Paul Horgan (1976) David M. Potter (Completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher) (1977) Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1978) Don E. Fehrenbacher (1979) Leon Litwack (1980) Lawrence A. Cremin (1981) C. Vann Woodward (1982) Rhys Isaac (1983) Thomas K. McCraw (1985) Walter A. McDougall (1986) Bernard Bailyn (1987) Robert V. Bruce (1988) James M. McPherson/Taylor Branch (1989) Stanley Karnow (1990) Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (1991) Mark E. Neely, Jr. (1992) Gordon S. Wood (1993) Doris Kearns Goodwin (1995) Alan Taylor (1996) Jack N. Rakove (1997) Edward Larson (1998) Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace (1999) David M. Kennedy (2000) Complete list (1917–1925) (1926–1950) (1951–1975) (1976–2000) (2001–2025)

Authority control VIAF: 85172111 ISNI: 0000 0001 1074 6672 GND: 136009220 BNF: cb12966273f

Persondata
Name	Litwack, Leon F.
Alternative names
Short description	American historian
Date of birth	December 2, 1929
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death