The Accident of Color A Story of Race in Reconstruction
“A provocative, welcome [and] illuminating investigation … of race in America [that] shows how much we have lost by denying the reality that ‘we are mestizos, Creoles, misfits all.’ ”
“Brook’s insightful [and] vivid history .… reminds readers that binary conceptions of race are relatively recent … and that [Reconstruction-era] civil rights [activists] rejected not just racism but race itself. [A] valuable contribution to the understanding of race in America.”
“A provocative, welcome [and] illuminating investigation … of race in America [that] shows how much we have lost by denying the reality that ‘we are mestizos, Creoles, misfits all.’ ”
“Brook’s insightful [and] vivid history .… reminds readers that binary conceptions of race are relatively recent … and that [Reconstruction-era] civil rights [activists] rejected not just racism but race itself. [A] valuable contribution to the understanding of race in America.”
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.
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.
Activists peacefully integrate 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 are educating students of all backgrounds side by side.
Tragically, the achievements of this movement are swept away by a violent political backlash and expunged from the history books, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that legalize segregation for a half century and usher in the binary racial regime that rules us to this day.
Praise for The Accident of Color
“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.”
“[A] poignant and powerful book.… Brook takes readers deep inside a world of shadows in 19th-century Charleston, SC and New Orleans.”
“[A] valuable history [that] goes a long way to injecting thoughtfulness into popular notions of the history of race and racism in America.”
“[F]ast-paced and intriguing, revelatory and provocative. Drawing deeply on archival materials, Brook.…concludes that…American history is Creole history.”
“A well-researched, fresh, and sometimes funny social history”
“[A] fascinating history.”
“[A] clear-eyed, provocative, and remarkably readable book.”
“Poignant [and] persuasive”
“Brook’s fascinating account exposes some of the tangled, less-acknowledged roots of American racism.”
“Brook’s new book…matters [for] the way we reckon with race today.”
