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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Mark Elliott. Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. viii, 388. $30.00.
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| This excellent biography, by far the best scholarly treatment of its important subject, tells the story of Albion Tourgée (1838–1905), the lawyer and author who at great personal cost dedicated his life to the cause of racial equality in the wake of the Civil War. But this thoroughly researched and well-written book provides more than a simple retelling of a life; it offers a compelling portrait of the intellectual and cultural milieu that shaped the antiracist civic commitments of one of the most prominent Yankee "carpetbaggers" and, thus, a window onto the origin of the most enduring ideals of Reconstruction. With the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court striking down the use of racial classifications in public school assignments, a ruling that implicitly involved a conflict over the meaning of Tour-gée's "color-blind" ideal of justice, Mark Elliott's work is especially timely. |
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