The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction

by Daniel Brook

Overview

A technicolor history of the first civil rights movement and its collapse into black and white.

In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as former slaves move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that rules the rest of the nation begins to intrude. During Reconstruction, a movement arises as mixed-race elites make common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all.

In some areas, this coalition proved remarkably successful. Activists peacefully integrated the streetcars of Charleston and New Orleans for decades and, for a time, even the New Orleans public schools and the University of South Carolina were educating students of all backgrounds side by side. Tragically, the achievements of this movement were ultimately swept away by a violent political backlash and expunged from the history books, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that would legalize segregation for a half century and usher in the binary racial regime that rules us to this day.

The Accident of Color revisits a crucial inflection point in American history. By returning to the birth of our nation’s singularly narrow racial system, which was forged in the crucible of opposition to civil rights, Brook illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393247442
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/18/2019
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Daniel Brook is a journalist and author whose writing has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, and the Nation. Born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, and educated at Yale University, Brook lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Table of Contents

Preface: Down the Memory Hole xiii

Introduction: Les Ambassadeurs xix

1 Misfit Metropolises 1

2 Strange Confederates 29

3 Legally Black 57

4 Freedom Riders 81

5 Progress on Parchment 105

6 Browns Versus Board of Education 123

7 Radical University 151

8 Laws and Outlaws 173

9 The Great Betrayal 213

10 Fade to Black and White 243

Conclusion: Living the Lie 283

Bibliographic Note 291

Acknowledgments 293

Notes 297

Index 331

Editorial Reviews

05/20/2019

The phrase “civil rights movement” is usually associated with the 1950s and 1960s, but, as journalist Brook’s insightful history shows, it is just as appropriately applied to the post–Civil War era. People of mixed racial heritage from Charleston and New Orleans, “misfit metropolises” that were home to sizable communities of free people of color, hoped to help the millions of ex-slaves, but were also concerned with protecting their own relatively privileged positions in the face of a new concept of race. That was the “one-drop rule,” according to which every American was either white or black, with no difference between “freemen and freedmen, wine merchants and cotton pickers.” Brook skillfully sketches the struggles of such men and women as Charles St. Albin Sauvinet, who battled educational inequalities in post–Civil War New Orleans, and Josephine DeCuir, who in 1873 successfully sued the steamboat company that would not honor her first-class ticket, an instance that showed how quickly post–Civil War racial advances were lost to Jim Crow segregation. Brook points out that later advances, such as the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, were based on the idea that individuals could and should be assigned unitary racial identities. Brook reminds readers that binary conceptions of race are relatively recent historical artifacts, and that the first post–Civil War civil rights movement rejected not just racism but race itself. This thoughtful and vivid history makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of race in America. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"The Accident of Color is a spell-binding exploration of mixed-race Charlestonians and New Orleanians who had built complex lives across the color line during and after the Civil War, and struggled mightily against the dawn of Jim Crow segregation in the latter parts of the nineteenth century. Heartbreaking but also vividly alive, The Accident of Color moves easily from court cases to activists on the ground to politicians in legislatures as it portrays the many ways people struggled for the right to define themselves in a time of hardening racial lines. A lovely, necessary book."

Gregory P. Downs

06/01/2019

Brook (The Trap) takes readers deep inside a world of shadows in 19th-century Charleston, SC, and New Orleans to discover the lives of free mixed-race people who occupied a place in between black and white and maintained their identity through strategic alliances with whites, their own social institutions, and a keen sense of racial boundaries. With deft descriptions of particular families, the author then shows how the abolishment of slavery ended that world, as "freedom" led to a binary realm of black or white, with no middle ground. By Brook's reckoning, most biracial families cast their lot with black citizens, fighting for civil rights. But ultimately racism overruled all the gains, and with the rise of Jim Crow and the loss of the ballot, biracial people either tried to pass as "white" or survive as best they could as black citizens. Brook's history points to the ways Reconstruction impacted urban settings differently than across much of the South, and how early civil rights attempts almost succeeded. In doing so, he reminds us that Jim Crowism and disfranchisement were not inevitable. VERDICT This poignant and powerful book shows us that decisions and laws surrounding racial identity and interest were deliberate. Knowing that matters in thinking about race today. [See Prepub Alert, 12/6/18.]—Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

Library Journal