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Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. By LEON F. LITWACK. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. xxi, 599 pp. $35.00.
LEON F. LITWACK's Trouble in Mind evocatively intersperses blues lyrics and church songs with the words of such notable African Americans as W. C. Handy, Zora Neale Hurston, Benjamin Mays, Pauli Murray, Rosa McCauley Parks, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, and Richard Wright. Most white southerners feared and detested these "New Negroes," who came of age in the Jim Crow era of the 1890s to the 1920s, because they were "more restless, less deferential, and, still worse, less fearful of whites" than the previously enslaved "old Negro" (p. 198). By resorting to vicious suppression, debasement, lynchings, and racial massacres (in Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898, and Atlanta, Georgia, 1906), whites impressed on them, especially successful middle-class blacks, that it was dangerous to rise above the status of a smiling, cheerfully acquiescent servant. Indeed, white southerners sought reassurance from the past by inventing Sambo and Mammy, idealized, and always deferential, slaves.
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