American historian Leon Litwack died on August 5 at the age of 91, after a teaching career at UC Berkeley and a Pulitzer Prize for Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. He got his start in Santa Barbara and returned in 2013 to give a talk, which Indy staffer Brandon Fastman previewed. We run it here again in remembrance of a remarkable man.
Before giving birth to Santa Barbara’s most celebrated purveyor of Mexican-style street food, the plot where La Super-Rica Taquería now stands housed one of our generation’s brightest chroniclers of African-American history. Growing up with working-class immigrant parents at 622 North Milpas Street and attending Franklin Elementary School in the midst of what he calls the barrio and we call the Eastside, Leon Litwack — Pulitzer Prize–winning author and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley — early on found a place in his heart for the underdog.
It was at the public library where he formed a political consciousness and at Santa Barbara High School in the 1940s where he began to express his social progressivism, much to the dismay of his teachers and administrators. The principal — along with the American Legion, Kiwanis, and Lions Club — balked when, as editor of The Forge (the school’s student newspaper) he wrote a front-page editorial asking that Reader’s Digest no longer be distributed in school, arguing that the publication was a Trojan Horse for right-wing indoctrination.