Albion Winegar Tourgée was an American soldier, lawyer, writer, politician, and diplomat. Wounded in the Civil War, he relocated to North Carolina afterward, where he became involved in Reconstruction activities. He served in the constitutional convention and later in the state legislature. A pioneer civil rights activist, he founded the National Citizens' Rights Association, and founded Bennett College as a normal school for freedmen in North Carolina.
Albion W. Tourgée
Historical marker in front of Albion Tourgée's boyhood home near Kingsville, Ohio; marker placed in May 2015.
On the left: Lt. Albion W Tourgée, 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, in 1863
The house in Mayville, New York, where Tourgée lived from 1881 until his posting to the French consulate in 1900.
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision ruling that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in quality, a doctrine that came to be known as "separate but equal". The decision legitimized the many state laws re-establishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction era in 1877. Such legally enforced segregation in the south lasted into the 1960s.
Justice Henry Billings Brown, author of the majority opinion in Plessy
Justice John Marshall Harlan became known as the "Great Dissenter" for his fiery dissent in Plessy and other early civil rights cases.
An Oklahoma City streetcar terminal's "colored" drinking fountain, 1939
1904 caricature of "White" and "Jim Crow" rail cars by John T. McCutcheon