Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1965. The Supreme Court's momentous school desegregation decision of 1954 was a postmortem victory for Albion Tourgee. Just fifty-eight years earlier this once-famous carpetbagger's attack on segregation was crushed in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. His legal defeat in 1896 typified his frustrated but prophetic career. Tourgee was an idealistic Union veteran who ventured south in 1865. As an advocate of civil rights, political equality, free schools, and penal reform, he was elected to North Carolina's Constitutional Convention of 1868. Olsen records both the fierce struggles and the impressive accomplishments that filled Tourgee's fourteen years in the South. With the collapse of the Southern experiment, Tourgee was inspired to turn to fiction to express his convictions. A Fool's Errand by One of the Fools and Bricks without Straw were classics of their day, providing absorbing accounts and defenses of radical Reconstruction. In 1879 Tourgee went north, where
Table of ContentsPreface
Introduction
Chapter 1. A Yankee Youth
Chapter 2. Liberty, Union, and War
Chapter 3. South to Emancipation
Chapter 4. White Man's Politics
Chapter 5. Entering the Vortex
Chapter 6. For the Straitest Sect
Chapter 7. A Maverick Republican
Chapter 8. Campaigning for Reconstruction – 1867
Chapter 9. The Reconstruction Convention of 1868
Chapter 10. Continued Triumph
Chapter 11. A Code Commissioner
Chapter 12. A Carpetbagger Judge and the Ku Klux Klan
Chapter 13. The Klan and Republican Collapse
Chapter 14. Portrait of a Carpetbagger
Chapter 15. A Tale of Redemption
Chapter 16. Tourgée and the Settlement of 1875
Chapter 17. The Final Blows
Chapter 18. A Fool's Errand By One of the Fools
Chapter 19. "Let There Be Light"
Chapter 20. The Continent Disaster
Chapter 21. Recovering at Thorheim
Chapter 22. The Bystander
Chapter 23. Commitment Deferred
Chapter 24. The National Citizens Rights Association
Chapter 25. Last Errands – The Basis and Bordeaux
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
