“The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction” – April 16, 2024
The Supreme Court of Louisiana Historical Society and the Law Library of Louisiana co-sponsored a CLE entitled The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction, held at the Historic New Orleans Collection on Tuesday, April 16, 2024. In this CLE, author Daniel Brook journeyed to 19th Century New Orleans and introduced attendees to cosmopolitan residents in New Orleans and Charleston, SC who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted. Before the Civil War, these free, openly mixed-race urbanites enjoyed some rights of citizenship and the privileges of wealth and social status. But after Emancipation, as the formerly enslaved move to assert their rights, the black-white binary that ruled the rest of the nation began to intrude. The presentation revisited a series of intellectually provocative late-nineteenth-century court challenges to segregation brought by openly mixed-race Louisiana plaintiffs.
Speaker
Daniel Brook is a journalist and author whose writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Legal Affairs. His previous book, A History of Future Cities, was longlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize and selected as one of the ten best books of the year by The Washington Post. His next book, The Einstein of Sex, an intellectual biography of the Berlin-based race, gender, and sexuality theorist and activist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) will be published by W. W. Norton in 2025. Brook’s research and writing have been supported by fellowships from institutions including the Library of Congress and Tulane University’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South. Born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, and educated at Yale, Brook lives in New Orleans.