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. Tourgee (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, Tourgee 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
Tourgee'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.