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  • A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy by Carolyn L. Karcher
  • Kristin Bouldin
A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy. Carolyn L. Karcher. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. ISBN 978-1-4696-2795-3, 464 pp., paper, $34.95.

Carolyn Karcher breaks new ground in the historiography of Albion Tourgée, Jim Crow, and African American resistance to white supremacy and racial violence during the nadir of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She tells familiar stories such as Reconstruction, the fight against lynching, early African American organization efforts, and the Plessy vs. Ferguson case but greatly improves the scholarship by emphasizing not only Tourgée's role but also the vital importance of progressive whites in assisting early African American civil rights efforts. Furthermore, she discusses the importance of Tourgée's ideas to the civil rights movement in the 1960s and to current political conflicts.

The work argues that detailed analysis of Tourgée's writings provides an "ideal lens through which to examine relationships between progressive whites and African-Americans" during the fight against the end of Reconstruction and the institution of Jim Crow (xi). Karcher states that Tourgée's efforts to encourage interracial dialogue, even among white supremacists, and especially the formation of the short-lived National Citizens' Rights Association, reflected the abolitionist movement and provided a concrete example for the NAACP and other organizations that emerged after Tourgée's death. Furthermore, Tourgée's writings, particularly the Bystander column, clearly demonstrate that racism plagued the North as well as the South, as Tourgée constantly criticized northern whites, including Republicans, for abandoning their commitment to racial equality in order to focus on economic and [End Page 200] business issues. However, when he became a consul in Bordeaux, France, Tourgée shifted his focus from African American equality to promoting American imperialism, and even supported Chinese and Japanese exclusion laws. This dramatic turn of events, Karcher contends, is due to both to his loss of hope for civil rights after the Plessy verdict and his lack of contact with Asian immigrants, since his long experience of working with African Americans formed a key motivation for his civil rights activism. Finally, Tourgée played a crucial role in the fight against lynching and, as a lawyer for Homer Plessy, in the Supreme Court case that would legalize segregation across the country. Historians, Karcher claims, have downplayed or even ignored the role of progressive whites in the early efforts to combat racial violence and Jim Crow, and her work greatly improves the historiography by correcting this oversight through extensive discussion of the role of Tourgée and his white allies in crusading for African American equality.

To make these claims, Karcher utilizes an extensive and wide-ranging evidentiary base that includes Tourgée's correspondence with civil rights organizations, prominent African Americans such as Ida B. Wells and Henry Martinet, Republican politicians, branches of the National Civil Rights Association, and newspaper editors. In addition, she includes extensive textual analysis of his novels, which used literature to advocate for civil rights; his Bystander column, which facilitated interracial correspondence and became a fierce campaigner for civil rights; and legal briefs that he filed in the case that became Plessy vs. Ferguson. This textual analysis greatly enhances the work as a whole and helps support the book's thesis, particularly by demonstrating the role of interracial organizing and progressive whites to the cause of African Americans. Furthermore, Karcher includes letters received and written by Tourgée, allowing readers to see how he responded to various positions, from advocates of white supremacy to African American leaders. The evidentiary base, therefore, is one of the book's strongest points.

Despite this, however, the work does have a couple of weaknesses. Its introduction should provide more of a background of the events of Reconstruction and especially the nadir, as this historical grounding would greatly enhance the narrative. Furthermore, the work could include more detail on gender and Tourgée's views on the roles of women, both black and white...

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