Leon Frank Litwack (December 2, 1929 – August 5, 2021) was an American historian whose scholarship focused on slavery, the Reconstruction Era of the United States, and its aftermath into the 20th century. He won a National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for History, and the Francis Parkman Prize for his 1979 book Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. After the spring 2007 semester he retired to emeritus status at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received the Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Teaching that year. Then he went on a lecture tour that led to his latest book, How Free Is Free? The Long Death of Jim Crow (2009). Biography Litwack was born in Santa Barbara, California, in 1929, the son of Minnie (Nitkin) and Julius Litwack. His Jewish parents had emigrated separately from Russia in the first decade of the 20th century and met in San Francisco. He received his BA in 1951 and PhD in 1958 from the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley and at the University of Wisconsin, University of South Carolina, Louisiana State University and Colorado College. Litwack's interest in history was sparked by The Growth of the American Republic, by Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager (1930). Litwack said, Historian Michael Les Benedict wrote that in 1961 "Leon Litwack showed how the federal government's pervasive support for slavery led to shameful treatment of free African Americans." Benedict was referring to pages 30–63 of chapter 2, titled "The Federal Government and the Free Negro" in Litwack's book, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860. In 1964–2007 Litwack taught at the University of California in Berkeley, where he became the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History, instructing more than 30,000 students. For much of that time he taught the introductory course in post-Civil War American History. He gave his final lecture as a professor, "Fight the Power", on Monday, May 7, 2007, in Wheeler Auditorium. Litwack was elected to the presidency of the Organization of American Historians. An enormously popular and influential teacher, he was profiled in Newsweek's 2006 edition of the "Giving Back Awards", having been nominated by one of his former students. He has received two distinguished teaching awards. Litwack was presented with the Golden Apple Award