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

xxi, 599 pp. 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.