Bricks Without Straw: A Novel

Albion W.Tourgee

Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1880

[A "fictionalized account of how Reconstruction was sabotaged. It is a chilling picture of violence against African Americans condoned, civil rights abrogated, constitutional amendments subverted, and electoral fraud institutionalized. Its plot revolves around a group of North Carolina freedpeople who strive to build new lives for themselves by buying land, marketing their own crops, setting up a church and school, and voting for politicians sympathetic to their interests, until Klan terrorism and the ascendancy of a white supremacist government reduce them to neo-slavery." - Carolyn Karcher, Duke, 2009] Bound in publisher's cloth. Hardcover. Good binding and cover.   6 preliminary leaves, [7]-521 pages ; 18 cm. 

Tourgee was one of the best known advocates for the rights of Freedmen and Colored Americans in the 1870s-1880s. He founded the National Citizens' Rights Association, served in the Civil War for the Union, and legally challenge the principle of separate but equal. He served as Homer Plessy's lead attorney in the landmark case supreme court case. He is cited as the originator of the term, "Color Blind."