Daniel Brook: The Accident of Color
Daniel Brook: The Accident of Color
In nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston, many cosmopolitan residents eluded 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.
Journalist and author Daniel Brook joins us at Town Hall with accounts from his book The Accident of Color, following this story through Reconstruction and revisiting a crucial inflection point in American history.
He highlights a movement that formed to oppose the black-white binary, where mixed-race elites made common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all.
