Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

African-American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853-1963. By Albert S. Broussard. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. x, 244 pp. $29.95, isbn 0-7006-0916-4.)

As the introduction to this rich narrative reminds us, African American families are drastically understudied. Albert S. Broussard's well-researched mosaic of the Stewarts is an attempt to remedy that problem, and it serves to remind historians of the benefits and pitfalls of this subfield. 1

The patriarch of the family, Thomas McCants Stewart (known as T. McCants), was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1853 and is unquestionably an exceptional nineteenth-century African American. As a lawyer, minister, emigrationist, writer, and lecturer, his life intersected with many of the best-known figures of antebellum and Reconstruction America: Booker T. Washington, T. Thomas Fortune, and Francis J. Grimké, to name a few. The first five chapters of African-American Odyssey recount Stewart's career and detail his extraordinary life. This is, perhaps, the strength of the book, as Broussard reveals, among other things, the complexities of antebellum black life in Charleston, the early years of Howard University, emigrationist ventures in Liberia, and the development of the Bethel ame church in New York City. Stewart's life makes for a riveting tour of nineteenth-century black history. Although Broussard readily admits that Stewart "often lacked originality as a racial thinker," at times the author appears a bit too taken with his subject, a pitfall few biographers escape. . . .

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