Literature Into Law: Interrogating Democracy in the Post-Reconstruction Nation

On Tourgée as national civil rights advocate and architect of Homer Plessy’s case, as well as the historical reception of his concept of “color-blind” justice.
 
Moderator/panelist
Alfred Brophy, Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law, UNC School of Law, writes about the racial history of the South and its contemporary impact. His books include Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation (2002) and Reparations Pro and Con (2006).

Panelists
Brook Thomas, Chancellor’s Professor of English, School of Humanities, University of California-Irvine. He is editor of the casebook Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History With Documents (Bedford, 1997) as well as author of numerous essays on the law and literature of the postwar nineteenth century.

Michael Curtis, Judge Donald L. Smith Professor in Constitutional and Public Law, Wake Forest University School of Law, is a preeminent constitutional historian and author of No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights (1986).

John David Smith , the Charles H. Stone Distinguished Professor of History at UNC Charlotte. With Mark Elliott, Smith has edited a collection of Tourgée’s papers, Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion W. Tourgée (2010).

A Fool's Errand? Reconstructing the Narrative of Freedom in North Carolina

On Tourgée’s life as lawyer, judge, public servant, and novelist in Reconstruction North Carolina, 1865-79.

Moderator/panelist
Ann McColl, attorney and independent scholar, is legislative director for the North Carolina Board of Education. She is the creator of Constitutional Tales, a dramatic presentation that brings the Constitutional Convention of 1868 to life.

Panelists
Frank Woods, visiting assistant professor and former director of the African American Studies program at UNC Greensboro, is the great-grandson of Adaline Patillo Woods, the formerly enslaved adopted daughter of Albion and Emma Tourgée.

Carolyn Karcher, professor emerita at Temple University, has published a scholarly edition of Tourgée’s novel Bricks Without Straw (2009) and is at work on a book about Tourgée’s relations with African Americans in the 1890s.

Judge Robert N. Hunter Jr., serves on the North Carolina Court of Appeals. He has lectured on Albion Tourgée for CLE credit for the NC Bar Association program on election law.

Mark Elliott is an associate professor of history at UNC Greensboro. He is author of Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson (2006). 

Blair Kelley is an associate professor of history at North Carolina State University. In Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of  Plessy v. Ferguson (2010), she examines some of the earliest struggles against Jim Crow, situating Plessy within a larger context of protest and resistance.

A participating event in the Pauli Murray Centennial Celebration, Pauli Murray Project, Duke Human Rights Center.

The Pauli Murray Project, an initiative of the Duke Human Rights Center focused on the Durham neighborhood where Murray grew up, is celebrating the 100th anniversary of her birth with a series of programs beginning in November. UNC-Chapel Hill’s contribution to this landmark occasion is this panel discussion highlighting Murray’s unsuccessful attempts in 1938-39 to gain admittance into the applied social work program within the sociology department chaired by Howard Odum. This is an involved and painful episode in the history of desegregation in North Carolina. The aims of the panel are to invite the university community to learn about this history and to encourage reflection on the story of Murray’s activism: what kind of example does she offer in our own time?