author
Albion Winegar Tourgée
1838–1905
A wounded Union veteran who turned his life into a campaign for justice, he wrote fiercely about Reconstruction and became one of the most outspoken white defenders of Black civil rights in his era.
2 Audiobooks
Bricks Without Straw: A Novel
by Albion Winegar Tourgée
Hullun yritys: Amerikalainen historiallinen romani
by Albion Winegar Tourgée
About the author
Born in Ohio in 1838, Albion Winegar Tourgée served in the Union Army during the Civil War and was badly wounded. After the war he moved to North Carolina, where he worked as a lawyer and judge and threw himself into the struggles of Reconstruction.
He became known both for his activism and for his writing. His novel A Fool’s Errand brought him a wide readership by dramatizing the violence and resistance that followed emancipation, and he went on publishing fiction and essays that argued for equal citizenship and challenged white supremacy.
Tourgée’s public life reached beyond literature. He is especially remembered as a civil rights advocate who helped argue Homer Plessy’s case in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that upheld segregation. He died in 1905, but his work is still read as an early and unusually clear defense of racial equality in the United States.