Color Blind Justice Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson

by Elliott, Mark

• ISBN13: 9780195370218
• ISBN10: 019537021X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-11-30
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Civil War officer, Reconstruction "carpetbagger," best-selling novelist, and relentless champion of equal rights, Albion Tourgee battled his entire life for racial justice. Now, in this engaging biography, Mark Elliott offers an insightful portrait of a fearless lawyer, jurist, and writer, whofought for equality long after most Americans had abandoned the ideals of Reconstruction.Elliott provides a fascinating account of Tourgee's life, from his childhood in the Western Reserve region of Ohio (then a hotbed of abolitionism), to his years as a North Carolina judge during Reconstruction, to his memorable role as lead plaintiff's counsel in the landmark Supreme Court casePlessy v. Ferguson . Tourgee's brief coined the phrase that justice should be "color-blind," and his career was one long campaign to made good on that belief. A redoubtable lawyer and an accomplished jurist, Tourgee wrote fifteen political novels, eight books of historical and social criticism, andseveral hundred newspaper and magazine articles that all told represent a mountain of dissent against the prevailing tide of racial oppression.Through the lens of Tourgee's life, Elliott illuminates the war of ideas about race that raged through the United States in the nineteenth century, from the heated debate over slavery before the Civil War, through the conflict over aid to freedmen during Reconstruction, to the backlash toward theend of the century, when Tourgee saw his country retreat from the goals of equality and freedom and utterly repudiate the work of Reconstruction.

Author Biography

Mark Elliott is Associate Professor of History at Wagner College.

Table of Contents

Note on Usage	p. ix
Introduction: Albion Tourgee and Color-Blind Citizenship	p. 1
The Color-Blind Crusade
Judge Tourgee and the Radical Civil War	p. 17
The Radical Advance
The Making of a Radical Individualist in Ohio's Western Reserve	p. 43
Citizen-Soldier: Manhood and the Meaning of Liberty	p. 73
A Radical Yankee in the Reconstruction South	p. 101
The Unfinished Revolution	p. 123
The Counterrevolution
The Politics of Remembering Reconstruction	p. 165
Radical Individualism in the Gilded Age	p. 193
Beginning the Civil Rights Movement	p. 231
The Rejection of Color-Blind Citizenship: Plessy v. Ferguson	p. 262
The Fate of Color-Blind Citizenship	p. 296
Acknowledgments	p. 317
Abbreviations	p. 321
Notes	p. 323
Index	p. 375
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