A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy - Softcover

Karcher, Carolyn L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1469627957 ISBN 13: 9781469627953

Publisher: University North Carolina Pr, 2016

Synopsis

During one of the darkest periods of U.S. history, when white supremacy was entrenching itself throughout the nation, the white writer-jurist-activist Albion W. Tourgee (1838-1905) forged an extraordinary alliance with African Americans. Acclaimed by blacks as ""one of the best friends of the Afro-American people this country has ever produced,"" and reviled by white Southerners as a race traitor, Tourgee offers an ideal lens through which to reexamine the often caricatured relations between progressive whites and African Americans. He collaborated closely with African Americans in founding an interracial civil rights organization eighteen years before the inception of the NAACP, in campaigning against lynching alongside Ida B. Wells and Cleveland Gazette editor Harry C. Smith, and in challenging the ideology of segregation as lead counsel for people of color in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case. Here, Carolyn L. Karcher provides the first in-depth account of this collaboration. Drawing on Tourgee's vast correspondence with African American intellectuals, activists, and ordinary folk; on African American newspapers; and on his newspaper column, ""A Bystander's Notes,"" in which he quoted and replied to letters from his correspondents, the book also captures the lively dialogue about race that Tourgee and his contemporaries carried on.

About this title

Review:

Competent scholarship based on original research. Highly recommended for both subject specialists and all readers interested in the biracial fight for equality long before the modern civil rights movement.--Library Journal, starred review

Urges historians not to dismiss Jim-Crow era white progressives like Tourgee as paternalists who fell short of 'present-day standards of political correctness.'--News & Observer

The author offers good, well-documented insights. Highly recommended.--CHOICE

About the Author:

Carolyn L. Karcher is the author of The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child and the editor of Tourgee’s novel Bricks Without Straw.

About this edition

• Publisher: University North Carolina Pr
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1469627957
• ISBN 13: 9781469627953
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 464