Black Americans of the post Reconstruction era, though technically freed from the depths of true slavery, now faced new unclear and ambiguous roles in society. Forced to understand the racial “rules” of southern life, black Americans underwent as author of Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow Leon Litwack called “baptisms”, or awakenings of racial awareness. Litwack expresses the fundamentals to living as a black American in southern society and skillfully exemplifies these revelations with primary sources explaining their epiphany or “baptism” on their racial perception. Among these baptisms experienced by the people of this era, one of them was definitely the acceptance of the submissive relationship with southern society. …show more content…
Litwack dedicates a whole section to the ability of african americans to “‘act the nigger’...for survival” (39). Litwack skillfully expressed how it was essential for black southerners to emulate the dumb and unintelligent persona that justified the white’s racism against black southerners. Litwack makes it clear that an “unsmiling black person alarmed whites, made them feel anxious and insecure” (38). African Americans not only needed to accept their circumstances but they needed to fully embrace this role for their own safety. If one was to look at a white person or even worse a white woman the wrong way, violence almost always ensued often at the cost of the “offender's” life. The example of Zora was used as the fact that she knew she “was going to be hung before [she] got grown” (39) due to the fact that she held herself with pride and had too much pride and audacity. This undertaking of a subservient persona was essential to survival, especially when it came to engagement with the police force. Throughout the south there was a distinct “absence of legal redress” (15) as in legal forces most definitely turned their vision away from the open and often violent crimes being committed against blacks. A black southerner of this time must be willing to put forth the energy to fit into the white …show more content…
Litwack uses various examples of resistance shown by african americans during this time of oppression but one common thread throughout these is the use of nature as a refuge. W.C. Handy’s baptism is described as a “racist oratory” (48) where Handy was presented with a racist situation to which he could not retaliate safely, so he took his responses out to the woods. Handy found refuge in nature where “The woodland took up my shouts. The words of my defiance echoed and reechoed… a great burden removed” (48). Blacks were in a hopeless state with constraints suffocating them at their every attempt at motion, nature was a way for them to find ease and release that which they could not release in their daily lives. Nature was also used as a form of resistance, shown in Br’er Rabbit which was symbolic for the struggle between blacks in slavery and their white masters. In these stories, the weaker animals (Br’er rabbit) were able able to devise schemes that would outwit the large animals such as bears and crocodiles, which eased blacks’ feelings of helplessness just enough for it to be bearable. Nature was used symbolically and physically as an escape from the chokehold southern society had on the wellbeing of black