An early crusader against segregation

MAY 26, 2016 10:30 AM
BY JOHN DAVID SMITH

On April 13, 1896, Albion W. Tourgée, the Ohio carpetbagger turned North Carolina lawyer, judge, novelist and civil rights crusader, presented an oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of Homer A. Plessy. A mixed race Louisianan, Plessy tested Louisiana’s law requiring separate accommodations for whites and blacks on railroad ...

Tourgée’s contacts with African-Americans ran deep and wide. Beginning in 1888 he published a column in the “Chicago Daily Inter Ocean” that attracted many black readers. He declared racial distinctions as arbitrary and unscientific and denounced disfranchisement, segregation and the quasi-slavery of black farmers ...

In 1891 Tourgée launched the generally forgotten interracial civil rights organization the National Citizens’ Rights Association (NCRA), foreshadowing the biracial National Association for the Advancement of Colored People founded in 1909. Committed to equal citizenship, the NCRA’s membership peaked at 250,000, including “Civil War veterans, scions of abolitionist families, African American intellectuals and activists, and barely literate plantation hands” ...

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