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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 PostIn 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.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book AwardBased on hitherto unexamined sources: interviews with ex-slaves, diaries and accounts by former slaveholders, this'rich and admirably written book'(Eugene Genovese, The New York Times Book Review) aims to show how, during the Civil War and after Emancipation, blacks and whites interacted in ways that dramatized not only their mutual dependency, but the ambiguities and tensions that had always been latent in'the peculiar institution.'Contents1.'The Faithful Slave'2. Black Liberators3. Kingdom Comin'4. Slaves No More5. How Free is Free?6. The Feel of Freedom: Moving About7. Back to Work: The Old Compulsions8. Back to Work: The New Dependency9. The Gospel and the Primer10. Becoming a People