Leon Litwack bears witness to black history with 'Stormy Monday' lectures

Litwack

By Franklin Crawford

Leon Litwack cracked open the first of a three-lecture stint at Cornell Nov. 9 with a bluesy "overture" -- and closed the talks on a solemn blue note. Armed with a small boombox, he set the tone for the 2004 Carl Becker lecture series with Bobby Blue Bland's version of T. Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday," and it fairly cast a spell. It was, after all, just one week after the presidential election, and many New Yorkers were in a blue state -- in more ways than one. As Bland sang, "They call it stormy Monday/but Tuesday's just as bad ..." there was an almost palpable, collective sigh.

Then Litwack took charge. The University of California-Berkeley scholar who helped to define the field of African-American studies had arrived dressed in his signature black leather jacket. His pugilist's mien suggested attendance in the school of hard knocks, and in fact, Litwack's time as a ship's messman with the Marine Cooks and Stewards' Union when he was young informed his ambitions to become a teacher and writer of history.

His Cornell tour de force, "Stormy Monday: Black Southerners in the Twentieth Century," attracted an audience of 50 to 60 people to 165 McGraw Hall. Litwack came at his subject swinging. Americans expressed outrage and incredulity at the terrorist attacks of 9-11, he said. It was "unprecedented" and "unbelieveable." Four years later, when news of the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities were revealed, leaders were quoted as saying "that's not the America I know," and President Bush himself called the behavior of U.S. prison guards "un-American."

"Where was their sense of history?" Litwack asked. As the day succumbed to a November twilight outside McGraw 165, he narrated a gritty, unflinching account of black American history from the Reconstruction period to the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that spared no one's sensibilities. The hard language and brutality of the Jim Crow reign of terror with its lynchings and savagery was described in all its horrible detail. For most of his career Litwack has made it his job to bear scholarly witness to a history of systematic oppression many Americans are eager to recast in comfortable terms or forget entirely. In 1980 Litwack won the Pulitzer Prize for Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. Among his other works are Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, and North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860. He has condensed much of his scholarship into these three presentations. As with all of his lectures, Litwack constantly revises and updates. Through extensive use of primary sources, he resurrects long-lost voices and his talk was peppered with verses from spirituals, blues tunes and old stories and jokes, his gravelly barrelhouse baritone well suited to the telling. His recitations stripped the commercial veneer off many of the now-legendary songs, restoring them to their original state of raw, painful truth. Many audience members who attended the first lecture returned for all three. Among these were two former Litwack protégés: Nick Salvatore, professor of industrial and labor relations and American studies, and Margaret Washington, professor of history. Litwack was Salvatore's thesis adviser at Berkeley and also served on Washington's Ph.D. committee.

There were moments of levity in Litwack's narrative, but he refused to let these alter the arc of a scholarly report that is far less than sanguine.

"At the dawn of the 21st century, it's a very different America, and it's a very familiar America," he said, closing his final address, the prelude to which was Public Enemy's "Fight the Power." "Everything has changed, but nothing has changed."