At a time when our national government is controlled by a racist in the While House, supported by openly white supremacist staff members, and backed by a Republican-controlled Senate and House—who have their positions due to the voting habits of white Republicans who either embrace and espouse racism, or enable it (which essentially makes it the same), we should explore not just black participation in fighting for racial justice and equality—we need to examine white allies in the battle. People of color are under siege—which makes the strengthening of coalitions with white allies crucial if we are to resist and push forward together.
I often write about black history that has been obscured, ignored and whitewashed. The history of white ally-ship with the black community has also been erased. Supremacists often call such persons “race traitors.” After the civil war which emancipated black Americans, white supremacists crafted a media blitz to spread fear, terror and slime about any white man or woman who allied themselves with newly freed slaves. They excoriated Republicans—which at that time was the party which included blacks. (Oh the irony of how that has changed). They also launched a program of physical terror, lynchings and massacres to back up their supremacist propaganda. During this time period the pejorative image of "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" from the North was widely disseminated. One of the white men who had stood up, time and time again for blacks and justice, was tarred by that brush. His name was Albion W. Tourgée.
Tourgée was an attorney for Homer Plessy—in the malignant SCOTUS case of Plessy v. Ferguson:
Perhaps the nation's most outspoken white Radical on the "race question" in the late 1880s and 1890s, Tourgée had called for resistance to the Louisiana law in his widely read newspaper column, "A Bystander's Notes," which, though written for the Chicago Republican (later known as the Chicago Daily Inter Ocean and after 1872 known as the Chicago Record-Herald), was syndicated in many newspapers across the country. Largely as a consequence of this column, "Judge Tourgée" had become well known in the black press for his bold denunciations of lynching, segregation,disfranchisement, white supremacy, and scientific racism, and he was the New Orleans Citizens' Committee's first choice to lead their legal challenge to the new Louisiana segregation law.
He was the founder of the National Citizens' Rights Association (NCRA) in 1891—the first interracial civil rights organization in the U.S.—the forerunner of the establishment of the NAACP in 1909 (which was also interracial).
There was no YouTube or Twitter during those ugly days after the war—however widely distributed supremacist cartoons illustrate the ugly attitudes toward both white defenders of black rights and the portrayal of freed black people—especially black men.
This print, “Murder of Louisiana sacrificed on the altar of radicalism” depicts:
President Ulysses S. Grant and Congress turned a blind eye to the disputed 1872 election of carpetbagger William P. Kellogg as governor of Louisiana. In this scene Kellogg holds up the heart which he has just extracted from the body of the female figure of Louisiana, who is held stretched across an altar by two freedmen. Enthroned behind the altar sits Grant, holding a sword. His attorney general, George H. Williams, the winged demon perched behind him, directs his hand. At left three other leering officials watch the operation, while at right women representing various states look on in obvious distress. South Carolina, kneeling closest to the altar, is in chains.
Baptist minister and novelist Thomas Dixon Jr. wrote books that glorified the Ku Klux Klan:
As an author, he wrote "Trilogy of Reconstruction", which consisted of The Leopard's Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor (1907). In these novels, Dixon used historical romance to present Blacks as inferior to whites and glorify the antebellum American South. Dixon is best known for The Clansman, which was to become the inspiration for D. W. Griffith's influential Birth of a Nation (1915). While he claimed to oppose slavery, he believed in a hierarchy of race based on pseudoscientific quasi-evolutionary theories.
Dixon was a classmate of future President Woodrow Wilson, who publicly praised The Birth of a Nation and helped to institute the government's harshest segregationist policies since before the Civil War. As well, Dixon wrote about the evils of socialism, particularly expressed in his trilogy: The One Woman (1903), Comrades (1909), The Root of Evil (1911). In 1919 the book Comrades was made into a motion picture titled "Bolshevism on Trial."
As a counter to the rising tide of white hate, were the voices of writers and activists like Tourgée:
Albion Winegar Tourgée, from Williamsfield, OH, was the son of Valentine Tourgée. and Louisa Emma Winegar, both farmers. His mother died when he was five. He grew up in Kingsville, OH, the Western Reserve, a center of antislavery sentiment; and in Lee, MA, where he spent two years with an uncle. Tourgee attended the University of Rochester in 1859, and was active in campus Republican politics. During this time he wrote an essay critical of prosecutions of distributors of Hinton Helper's antislavery book ("The Impending Crisis of the South").
Tourgée was a private in the Union army, yet received his degree in 1862 in recognition of his military service from the University of Rochester. He fought at the battle of Bull Run (First Manassas), where he received a serious spinal injury, which caused him temporary paralysis and a permanent back problem that plagued him for the rest of his life. In January 1863, he was captured near Murfreesboro, TN, sent to a Confederate prison, and later exchanged and returned to Ohio. Later that year he married Emma Doiska Kilbourne, with whom he had one child. He returned to the service and participated in major engagements at Chattanooga and Chickamauga, TN. After the war, he and his wife moved to Greensboro, N.C., partly on the advice of a doctor that he seek a warmer climate for his health.
Tourgée's commitment to racial equality, broader democracy, and protection of the economic underdog, white and black, collided with the values of most of the southern elite. From 1866 to 1867, he edited a Republican newspaper, the "Union Register," in Greensboro. Tourgée. was also elected superior court judge and served from 1868 to 1874. He roused the ire of conservative opponents of Reconstruction by insisting that blacks be included on jury lists and that the jail be heated in winter, a concern for inmates that conservative critics believed would encourage crime.
A must-read on Tourgée is Carolyn L. Karcher’s A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy:
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. Tourgée (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, Tourgée 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 Tourgée'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.
You can also listen to and view Karcher’s lecture “Albion W. Tourgée and the Interracial Campaign Against Lynching.”
Mark Elliott co-edited Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion W. Tourgée and wrote this biography as well:
Civil War officer, Reconstruction "carpetbagger," best-selling novelist, and relentless champion of equal rights--Albion Tourgée 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, who fought for equality long after most Americans had abandoned the ideals of Reconstruction. Elliott provides a fascinating account of Tourgée'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 case Plessy v. Ferguson. Tourgée's brief coined the phrase that justice should be "color-blind," and his career was one long campaign to make good on that belief. A redoubtable lawyer and an accomplished jurist, Tourgée's writings represent a mountain of dissent against the prevailing tide of racial oppression. A poignant and inspiring study in courage and conviction, Color-Blind Justice offers us an unforgettable portrayal of Albion Tourgée and the principles to which he dedicated his life.
One of the things that has fascinated me about Tourgée is that he was also a novelist. His works of fiction:
- Toinette (1874)
- Figs and Thistles: A Western Story (1879)
- A Fool's Errand (1879)
- Bricks Without Straw (1880)
- 'Zouri's Christmas (1881)
- John Eax and Marmelon; or, The South Without the Shadow (1882)
- Hot Plowshares (1883)
- Button's Inn (1887)
- Black Ice (1888)
- With Gauge and Swallow, Attorneys (1889)
- Murvale Eastmas, Christian Socialist (1890)
- Pactolus Prime (1890)
- '89 (1891)
- A Son of Old Harry (1892)
- Out of the Sunset Sea (1893)
- An Outing with the Queen of Hearts (1894)
- The Mortgage on the Hip-Roof House (1896)
- The Man Who Outlived Himself (1898) stories
His most often republished work has been A Fool's Errand. This edition from Harvard University Press, was edited by one of my favorite historians—John Hope Franklin:
What was a carpetbagger? Albion W. Tourgée was called one, and he wrote, “To the southern mind it meant a scion of the North, a son of an ‘abolitionist,’ a creature of the conqueror, a witness to their defeat, a mark of their degradation: to them he was hateful, because he recalled all of evil or of shame they had ever known … To the Northern mind, however, the word had no vicarious significance. To their apprehension, the hatred was purely personal, and without regard to race or nativity. They thought (foolish creatures!) that it was meant to apply solely to those, who, without any visible means of support, lingering in the wake of a victorious army, preyed upon the conquered people.”
Tourgée’s novel, originally published in 1879 anonymously as A Fool’s Errand, By One of the Fools, is not strictly autobiographical, though it draws on Tourgée’s own experiences in the South. In the story Comfort Servosse, a Northerner of French ancestry, moves to a Southern state for his health and in the hope of making his fortune. These were also Tourgée’s motives for moving South. Servosse is caught up in a variety of experiences that make apparent the deep misunderstanding between North and South, and expresses opinions on the South’s intolerance, the treatment of the Negro, Reconstruction, and other issues that probably are the opinions of Tourgée himself. “Reconstruction was a failure,” he said, “so far as it attempted to unify the nation, to make one people in fact of what had been one only in name before the convulsion of Civil War. It was a failure, too, so far as it attempted to fix and secure the position and rights of the colored race.”
Though the discussion of sectional and racial problems is an important element in the book, A Fool’s Errand has merit as a dramatic narrative—with its love affair, and its moments of pathos, suffering, and tragedy. This combination of tract and melodrama made it a bestseller in its day. Total sales have been estimated as 200,000, a remarkable record in the l880’s for a book of this kind.
Though Tourgée later disavowed his early optimism about the role national education could play in remedying the race problem in the South, calling this a “genuine fools notion,” he might have been less pessimistic had he been alive in 1960, when the student sit-in movement began in the South. At any rate, today in what has been called the second phase of the modern revolution in race relations in this country, Tourgée’s novel about the first phase has an added relevance and interest for thinking American readers.
You can read it free online.
Tourgée died in France on May 21, 1905, and was cremated and his ashes are buried in Mayville, New York. The obelisk that marks his gravesite reads: “I pray thee then Write me as one that loves his fellow-man.”