Overview

Brutal slavery existed all over the New World, but only America followed emancipation with a twisted system of segregation. The Accident of Color asks why. Searching for answers, Daniel Brook journeys to the places that resisted Jim Crow the longest. In the cosmopolitan port cities of New Orleans and Charleston, integrated streetcars plied avenues patrolled by integrated police forces for decades after the Civil War. This progress was ushered in during Reconstruction when long-free, openly biracial communities joined in coalition with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness. Tragically, their victories-including integrated schools-and their alliance itself were violently uprooted by segregation along a stark, new black-white color line. By revisiting a turning point in the construction of America's uniquely restrictive racial system, The Accident of Color brings to life a moment from our past that illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by.

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9780393531725

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Reviews

"""A spell-binding exploration of mixed-race Charlestonians and New Orleanians who… built complex lives across the color line.… Heartbreaking but also vividly alive, The Accident of Color… 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"

A spell-binding exploration of mixed-race Charlestonians and New Orleanians who... built complex lives across the color line.... Heartbreaking but also vividly alive, The Accident of Color... 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, Nation, and New York Times Magazine, and he is the author of several books, including A History of Future Cities and The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction. 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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