On the international stage, Emeritus Professor of History at UC – Berkeley Leon Litwack has received the American Book Award, the Francis Parkman Prize and the Pulitzer Prize. Back on his home turf, he’s a legend who likes rap, writes books and conducts his ever-popular courses with breathtaking knack and charm. Last Thursday, Nov. 8 at Wilder, Litwack was even more — he was the man who brought the power.

    Litwack began his lecture, sponsored by the Oberlin African American studies department, with a song by seminal Rapcore group Public Enemy. “People, people we are the same,” ran the lyrics to band’s anthem “Fight the Power.” They sang, “no we’re not the same / ‘cause we don’t know the game / what we need is awareness.” 

Litwack said that indeed, social justice does not quite make races equal in their rights. In waterlogged New Orleans, 84 percent of victims who wallowed in the tepid administrative response were African American. Twelve percent of all African Americans in New Orleans are unemployed and 22 percent live in poverty — both rates are over double the national statistics — and 28 percent of black men will be sent to jail in their lifetimes, to make up 50 percent of America’s prisoners. All in all, this is hardly the stuff of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dreams,  the founding fathers’ or that of the well-meaning believer in the One United People: The Federalist Papers and the National Idea, who trusts that race is dead and the field leveled. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, said Litwack, “everything is changed, but nothing is changed.”

    But Litwack explains that this does not mean the advances since the 1950s should be discounted. Victories are considerable and early in his lecture Litwack piled them in heaps: Coretta Scott King and her marchers’ exultant return to Selma 20 years after activists were clubbed, George Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” speech and other cases appropriately remarkable. These changes, argued Litwack, often took on a “dramatic sign that was misleading,” because where legal restraints and race dissolved, economic barriers and class restrictions held fast. While blacks earned mayorships in 300 cities, well-to-do non-blacks fled out of urban centers, making “a mockery of integration” and poverty.

     Inner-city public schools, for the most part, appear little different today on the integration front than circumstances three decades ago. According to James S. Kunen’s article in Time (“The End of Integration”), in 1996 Detroit’s public school system was 94 percent minority. Also telling, a third of the nation’s black public school students attend schools in which enrollment is 90 to 100 percent minority; in the northeast, half of all black students do. Ironically, de facto segregation is somewhat embraced among black activists, who point out that due to white flight and deep-seated prejudices — in spite of desegregation ordered by local school boards — desegregation is often at the cost of inner-city minority students, who are bussed long distances to schools where they are not always welcome and passed over at quality, city-funded magnet schools with an instated quota of whites to fill.    

Litwack says that the skepticism of African Americans toward local, forced desegregation is not so much a message of ambivalence toward integration per se. Rather, it tells of something more dismaying: that African Americans see that even today, they cannot maneuver to their benefit within ostensibly fair policies. Litwack likens the modern politics game to a race in which one man is held back while other contestants zip triumphantly halfway to the finish line. According to Litwack, America then releases the man with a slap on the backside, exhorts, “Go baby, you’re free,” and awaits his catch-up hopefully.

“It takes an unusual man to win [such a] race,” remarked Litwack. He added darkly, “It is easier to shoot the starter.”

He listed black music ensembles — the Supremes, the Impressions, the Miracles — that cropped up immediately following the Civil Rights Movement as examples. singing Curtis Mayfield in the Impressions’ hit single: “Hey, hey, we’re movin’ on up…’cause we’re a winner/ and everybody knows it too,/ we’ll just keep on pushing like your leaders tell you to.” 

But today’s tide is markedly less hopeful. Groups like Outkast, Urban Underground and N.W.A. leer at the vanguard, asking such questions as “Who will police the police?” and shocking the American public with profanity. Litwack was quick to say, however, that such blasphemy is no worse than the “lies mouthed by our presidents.”

The phrase “Violence is not the answer,” an example of such a lie — so deliciously smooth on the tongue during the race riots of 1965-1968 — curiously failed to apply in Vietnam.

 Following the lecture, Litwack took questions from the audience, which geared inquiries toward how change against white hegemony may be effected. Litwack was earnest but not optimistic. The “three worst Presidents in U.S. history,” he said, have been the past three, and he as a historian could see no clear path toward the true equalization of opportunity.

“I try to do my part,” said Litwack, “through teaching, through talks.”  The rest is up to those who hear.

Litwack retired in spring 2007 with acclaim and awards, including the coveted Golden Apple, conferred by students to celebrate their favorite professor. His students include Steve Brier, co-founder of the American Social History Project; Jason Sokol, OC ’99, a Cornell professor himself, who appears regularly on television and radio for talks on race relations and over 30,000 others who continue his legacy of giving — in the words of Public Enemy — the “power to the people... in order to fight the powers that be.”