Shared from the 8/15/2021 San Francisco Chronicle eEdition

LEON LITWACK 1929-2021

Berkeley lecturer lifted the voiceless

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Jane Scherr

UC Berkeley Professor Leon Litwack was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for History.

Wheeler Auditorium is the largest lecture hall at UC Berkeley with 732 seats, and more often than not they were all occupied by the time Leon Litwack walked down the aisle with just one minute to spare to begin History 17D, a brisk course that surveyed the Civil War to the present day in 10 weeks.

Three times a week, the esteemed professor would hold forth, enhancing some lectures with multimedia presentations he made himself.

If the day’s topic was the Great Depression, he’d show dreary soup lines overlaid with a soundtrack of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.” If it was the 1960s, it would be another film he made, mixed with snippets from Vietnam and “Leave It to Beaver,” with “America” by Simon and Garfunkel piped in.

But it was Litwack’s own voice, his timing and his cadence, that made each class a theatrical experience. That’s what former students remembered decades later upon learning that Litwack died Aug. 5 at his home in North Berkeley. The cause of death was bladder cancer, said his wife, Rhoda. He was 91.

“The lectures themselves were 50-minute polished essays,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association in Washington, D.C., who was a teaching assistant in History 17D in the 1970s.

“He would open his folder, look at his notes and start to talk with no introduction. He would finish 50 minutes later on the dot and frequently the students would applaud at the end of the lecture.”

Litwack, who specialized in African American history, the American South and labor history, was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for history for “Been in the Storm So Long: the Aftermath of Slavery,” in 1979. His course textbook, “The United States,” went through many editions with co-author Winthrop Jordan.

But Litwack was a lecturer above all else and never considered it a burden to teach the basic introductory course, which he did almost every year for his entire career at UC Berkeley, which lasted from 1964 through 2007.

An estimated 30,000 students took his courses during those 43 years, most of them freshmen and sophomores looking to fulfill a course requirement. One of these was Gary Pomerantz, a sophomore from Woodland Hills (Los Angeles County) planning to major in political science. Litwack’s class was his first history class, and he started in the back row. By the second class he’d moved up a few rows, and within a few weeks he’d decided to major in history.

“I was mesmerized by this telling of our past,” said Pomerantz, who went on to write six books on history, race and sports, and now lectures in the graduate program in journalism at Stanford University. “This was not the founding fathers. This was something more nuanced. Litwack was expanding the American narrative by telling the stories of working-class people and people of color.”

In 2002, Litwack suffered a stroke that forced him to miss two years of teaching. He had to undergo speech therapy and relearn how to walk, but he returned, walking into Wheeler with the aid of an African carved cane.

When he finally retired, in May 2007, students and former students packed Wheeler beyond its capacity. At the end of the lecture, Litwack got his customary round of applause plus a long standing ovation, to the labor anthem “Joe Hill,” sung by Joan Baez, which he selected for his exit song.

“I was definitely crying because it was the end of an era,” recalled Amy Lippert, his final head teaching assistant, who went on to teach at Colby College and Northwestern. “Leon’s class and his entire life experience was always about something bigger than himself. It was about restoring a voice to the voiceless.”

Leon Frank Litwack was born Dec. 2, 1929, in Santa Barbara, the only child of Russian immigrants. His father was a gardener and his mother a seamstress, and he grew up in a working-class neighborhood of mostly Mexican Americans. He graduated from Santa Barbara High School in 1947, and after one year at junior college he transferred to UC Berkeley.

By the time he finally left, in 1958, he had his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and doctorate. He was also married to Rhoda Goldberg, class of 1953, whom he’d met when she was an undergraduate from Los Angeles studying social welfare. They met on a set-up date at KingPin Donuts on Telegraph Avenue.

His first job was as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. While there, the University of Chicago Press published his dissertation, “North of Slavery,” in 1961. Still in print, it is considered the classic study of African Americans in the Northern states before the Civil War.

In the fall of 1964, Litwack returned to Berkeley as a visiting professor on a one-year contract. He never left. In 1965, the Litwacks bought a home in Berkeley’s Cragmont district with a view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge, where they lived ever after. They raised two children, John and Anne.

It was a 30-minute walk downhill to his office at Dwinelle Hall, the history department. “He had a great life and he knew it,” said Rhoda Litwack. “He loved his life as a professor, writing, teaching, everything about it.”

He was promoted to full professor in 1971 and was named to the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Chair in American History. He was also awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley’s highest honor, and had served as president of the Organization of American Historians.

“This is the No. 1-ranked history department in the country (according to U.S. News & World Report), and Leon is central to that,” said Cathryn Carson chair of the Department of History. “The students he trained in African American and social history rippled out into the field and transformed it.”

Litwack regularly invited his 15 or 20 teaching assistants over for a long dinner at his home, with conversation and music lasting deep into the night.

One of the regulars at those dinners was Derk Richardson, the KPFA radio host and music writer who had Litwack as his doctoral adviser for eight years in the 1970s. At these dinners the conversation often shifted to blues and Bob Dylan. Litwack was the expert on the blues, but Richardson was his equal on Dylan.

Richardson never finished his dissertation but that did not affect his relationship with Litwack. They’d meet and go record shopping in Berkeley. At Litwack’s 50th birthday, Richardson and his wife, Robin, did a tap dance on the hardwood floor of Litwack’s living room, to a Fats Waller or Duke Ellington tune.

Dinners with former TAs went on long after Litwack retired. They survive him, as do his wife of 69 years and children John Litwack of Chevy Chase, Md., and Ann Litwack of Berkeley, and two grandchildren.

Twenty years after taking Litwack’s introductory course, Pomerantz was teaching journalism at Emory University in Atlanta. A colleague mentioned that he was having dinner with Litwack, who was in Atlanta to do research. Pomerantz tagged along, and by the end of dinner had been offered Litwack’s office in Dwinelle Hall, during summer break, to write his second book.

“I didn’t know him as a student other than from the back of Wheeler Auditorium,” Pomerantz said. “But every student mattered to him. I was one of 30,000 who’d taken that one class, and he treated me like I was the only one.”

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SamWhitingSF

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