Reconstruction was America’s missed opportunity, a chance to bring economic and political justice to the freed slaves. Until recently, the short-lived period of federal intervention in the defeated South following the Civil War was usually derided as a mistake, and the bitter response of white Southerners (including the KKK) was rationalized.
The latest book to challenge those racist perspectives on history focuses on one aspect of Reconstruction, the role of Creoles (“free men of color”)—what today might be called the multiracial population of New Orleans and Charleston, S.C., cities tied to the lax parameters of the Caribbean rather than the rigid Puritanism of North America. In the West Indies, people found identity along a spectrum of colors. In much of the U.S., people were deemed as either black or white.
Before the Civil War, Daniel Brook notes in The Accident of Color, Creoles sided with white slave owners—many of them blood relatives. But afterward, as the South began to impose a binary white-black identity through Jim Crow laws, the often educated and affluent Creoles took the lead in an early civil rights movement by protesting segregated public transit systems in New Orleans and Charleston. They engaged in marches, sit-ins and legal test cases. They lost, thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court that refused to extend civil rights to all Americans and a federal government, eager to reintegrate the Southern states into the Union, reluctant to anger whites. Brook’s fascinating account exposes some of the tangled, less-acknowledged roots of American racism.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.