the unlikely disciple a sinner's semester at america's holiest university

Basic Civitas, $23.įor Marshall, an acclaimed novelist, the James River, running through Richmond, Va., has been polluted by more than PCBs and heavy metals, or even remnant toxins from the Civil War munitions factories that still stand on its banks. The images and details can numb the mind, deaden the senses they tax our sense of who we are and who we have been.” The same is true of this searing, challenging book. left to endure lives of quiet despair.” As Litwack writes of lynchings: “This is not an easy history to absorb. In his presentation, America has a long way to go: school integration has effectively failed, and the rise of many blacks into the middle class and positions of power belies the “larger number.

They form a chorus affirming Litwack’s excruciating record of injustice, and breathe pity and pain into the crimes and humiliations he documents. Quotations crowd every page: from poets and novelists, former slaves, black laborers and professionals, bluesmen and rappers - as well as legions of white bigots.

But the accumulated facts here, gathered over a lifetime of first-rate scholarship (Litwack won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980), show that for many Americans racial struggle isn’t a chapter or a sidebar in our national story it is our national story. Litwack views the whole sweep of the American Century, including both world wars, through a racial lens. Based on a series of talks he gave at Harvard, it chronicles nearly 150 years of lynching, exploitation and institutionalized oppression. Litwack titled the last lecture of his teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley, “Fight the Power,” and this short account of the black experience in America from the Civil War to Hurricane Katrina could turn any reader into a radical.

HOW FREE IS FREE? The Long Death of Jim Crow.

The unlikely disciple a sinner's semester at america's holiest university