Leon F. Litwack

Leon Litwack (elected April 1984) died August 5, 2021. Litwack, who served on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1964 until his retirement in 2007, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979); his other books include North of Slavery: The Free Negro in the Antebellum North (1961) and Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998). Inspired in childhood by the historical scholarship of W. E. B. Du Bois, he maintained throughout his career a focus on the experiences of Black people, grounded in sources that expressed their thoughts and aspirations. His activism in scholarship and life did not preclude him from a love of the blues and rock and roll.