| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Albert S. Broussard. African-American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853–1963. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 1998. Pp. x, 244. $29.95.

Albert S. Broussard's multi-generational study of the T. McCants Stewart family contributes to the long-neglected but currently budding field of African-American family history. This clearly written and engaging volume illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of family history. As Broussard demonstrates, the Stewart family saga illuminates the larger story of black history and race relations, as well as the black elite's leadership in the struggle for equality through several generations. But their tale also reveals difficulties inherent in interpreting family history. Not only is it tough to penetrate the inner sanctum of family life and its often complex dynamic, it is also tricky to untangle personal shortcomings from societal failings. 1

While exploring this elite family across three generations, well over half of Broussard's book focuses on T. McCants Stewart, the family patriarch. Born free in Charleston before the Civil War, Stewart came of age just as educational opportunities proliferated for African Americans in the South. Like many educated young black men of his generation, he saw his role as providing leadership and "uplift" for less fortunate members of the community. But the peripatetic Stewart, after teaching and briefly practicing law, permanently left the South in 1878, first to attend seminary and then to pastor a church in New York City. Stewart's migration north was the first in a series of moves and career changes that marked his life. Always seeking career advancement as well as a more tolerant racial climate, Stewart made two disastrous forays to Liberia and an economically ruinous move to Hawaii, lived several years in London, and spent his final years in St. Thomas, where he died in 1923. . . .

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