Leon Litwack

Leon F. Litwack was a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who illuminated dark corners of the American past by exploring the bitter legacy of slavery and segregation and by confronting the lingering presence of white supremacy in the national consciousness. Litwack spent most of his academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught an introductory survey of American history that routinely attracted more than 700 students a semester. He was the author of several landmark works, including Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Francis Parkman Prize for history. With his emphasis on history from the ground up, Litwack can be seen in some respects as an intellectual forebear of recent movements to focus attention on the country’s racial divide and the plight of marginalized groups in American life.