Today was Professor Leon Litwack’s last lecture in his undergraduate American history class (History 7B: US History from the Civil War to the Present). Litwack has taught the course for nearly 40 years, educating around 30,000 Berkeley undergraduates. The ten minutes or so of standing ovation he received at the end of the lecture was a testament to the esteem not only in which his current students hold him but also how he is regarded by the many former students and colleagues who came from around the country to attend.

Several weeks ago Professor Litwack delivered his “Ideal Last Lecture” which was part of his Golden Apple Award. That honor was presented by Berkeley students. His “Ideal Last Lecture” is Webcast unlike (unfortunately) his actual last lecture.

The general theme of his lecture was “fight the power” and he spent the hour talking about race and class in the contemporary, post-Civil Rights Movement United States. His argument was that economics and discrimination based upon class has supplanted Jim Crow and overt racial discrimination. He began the lecture with an anecdote from Elliott Jaspin’s Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America about a town in Georgia that manages through a variety of practices to keep out blacks. Legal equality means little in the face of economic and social reality.

Professor Litwack cited a litany of statistics and examples to show that black Americans are disproportionately hurt by poverty. Particularly resonant with me was what he mentioned about the educational system in the United States. During the 1960s and 1970s the goal was public school integration, that is, to get blacks into schools with whites. Since the 1980s, Professor Litwack argued, the goal has been to keep them there while simultaneously middle class whites have “fled” to suburbs and increasingly to private schools. Statistically, schools remain racially stratified, and it is only the form of segregation that has changed.

There were quite a few meaningful and interesting points in the lecture. My only complaint was that the cumulative effect was to leave the audience with a sense of the world getting worse, or at least not getting any better. I suppose it is not the job of a historian to tell us what to do or how to change the present, but I could not help wishing that he had another hour to tell us ways that we could positively impact the depressing trends he laid out for us.

The closest he came to that sort of call to action was the suggestion throughout the lecture that America as a nation needs to own up to its history of slavery and racial discrimination. Education, of course, takes us part of the way to achieving that. Professor Litwack’s committment not only to his scholarship but also to his teaching of so many undergraduates has done so much more than any of the rest of us.

Despite my academic interest in British history, the lecture inspires me to read two recent books about racism in the United States: