Overview

In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston, where free biracial people exercised many rights of citizenship and fought to secure them for all after the Civil War. In coalition with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness, they notched significant victories?like desegregating streetcars and schools?and launched an audacious legal strategy to defeat racism by challenging race itself. Tragically, all was swept away by a violent political backlash, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that would legalize segregation and usher in a binary racial regime that endures to this day. By revisiting a turning point in the evolution of America's racial system, this ?poignant and powerful book? (Library Journal) brings to life a moment from our distant past that illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.

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9780393247442

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Reviews

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, professor of history, University of California, Davis, and author of The Second American Revolution

Author Information

Daniel Brook is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Nation, and the New York Times Magazine and the author of several books, including A History of Future Cities. A New York native and a Yale graduate, Brook lives in New Orleans. He researched The Einstein of Sex in Berlin on a Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship.

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