Leon Litwack

Leon F. Litwack served as the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor Emeritus of American History in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. A product of Berkeley himself, he received his B.A. in 1951 and Ph.D. in 1958 from the university's Department of History. Litwack joined the faculty in 1964 and remained for over four decades until his retirement in 2007. During his tenure, he taught more than 30,000 undergraduates, primarily through his legendary History 7B survey course on America from the Civil War to the present, which drew over 500 students per lecture. Known for his passionate, energizing lectures that foregrounded the experiences of ordinary people—especially African Americans—and critically examined the contradictions between American ideals and realities, Litwack pioneered one of the department's first courses on African American history with colleague Winthrop Jordan. He received two university Distinguished Teaching Awards and the 2007 Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Teaching.

Litwack's scholarship profoundly shaped the fields of African American history, Southern history, and American social history, emphasizing "history from the bottom up" and the human consequences of events like slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation. His major publications include North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 1961); Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (Knopf, 1979), which garnered the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and Francis Parkman Prize; Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (Knopf, 1998); and How Free is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow (Harvard University Press, 2009). He also co-edited Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 1988), collaborated on Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000), and served as general editor of The Harvard Guide to African-American History (2001). Among his honors were a 1967 Guggenheim Fellowship, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and presidencies of the Organization of American Historians and Southern Historical Association. Litwack's influence extended through mentoring generations of scholars and his commitment to public history, including film projects like To Look for America (1971).