Reviewed by: The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction by Daniel Brook Mary Niall Mitchell The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction. By Daniel Brook. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019. Pp. xxiv, 344. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-0-393-53172-5; cloth, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-393-24744-2.) There are plenty of parallels between the end of Reconstruction in the United States and the political struggles of 2020. Although Radical Reconstruction's end is just part of the story that author Daniel Brook tells in The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction, the echoes in these [End Page 533] pages of today's racial and political divisions are unmistakable. In 1876, politicians in Washington, D.C., were questioning the results of the presidential election; voter suppression techniques aimed at people of color proliferated; and experts brought into southern states offered "tutorials on how to steal an election" (p. 218). A gubernatorial candidate in South Carolina (former Confederate general Wade Hampton III) mounted a parade featuring racist signs like those that have appeared at contemporary political rallies: "Carolina, Home of the White Man" (p. 221). If we needed to put a finer point on this comparison, we would look no further than the so-called Jim Crow Caucus disputing the 2020 presidential election, a recently formed group bent on erasing votes in majority-Black districts. Brook could not have foreseen all that transpired in 2020, but his book is timely and aimed explicitly at a general readership. In allowing civil rights activists of the Civil War and Reconstruction era to tell their stories "on their own terms," he hopes to "help remove our own blind spots about the long, imperfect struggle to build the world's most diverse democracy and about the racial system that still mars our national life" (p. xviii). While it is not clear to whom our refers—Americans of color generally have a clear view of the racial system they navigate every day—it is true that the nation's democracy is a work in progress. In light of present realities, in particular, the long struggle for civil rights is worth telling and retelling. Using the biographies of civil rights activists and their white supremacist opponents as building blocks, Brook's story centers on two so-called Misfit Metropolises: Charleston and New Orleans. By 1850, both cities had large, prosperous populations of free people of color. After the Civil War, many of these formerly free men of color, along with some men who had been born in slavery, became elected officials and powerful public voices advocating civil rights in public accommodations, including streetcars and schools. The author traces these political debates in a narrative synthesis of secondary literature, newspaper reports and editorials, records of constitutional conventions, and other printed statehouse deliberations. The scant bibliographical note at the end is kept minimal, referencing the granddaddies of Reconstruction history (W. E. B. Du Bois and Eric Foner) along with a few books on race, such as Barbara J. Fields and Karen Fields's work and Nell Irvin Painter's A History of White People (New York, 2010). The author has clearly used many of the rich secondary sources available for this period but does not discuss them in this note. Further, while Brook's skills as a journalist are valuable when applied to the complicated politics of Reconstruction, there are points at which a more serious tone would better serve the subjects of his story. To cite one example, he refers to the spiritualist practice of Creoles of color in New Orleans as a "voodoo séance" even though it was not voodoo, and spiritualism was popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century (p. 76). Nonetheless, The Accident of Color is a timely account of the complicated politics of race and racism in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. The book illuminates Reconstructionera strides toward racial equity as well as the successes of white supremacist politicians who rallied their base and set the stage for the next reckoning. [End Page 534] Mary Niall Mitchell University...
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Jul 1, 2021
Sofya Isaakyan + 3
Open Access
