Albion Winegar Tourgée

Albion Winegar Tourgée. Civil War Soldier, Attorney, Civil Rights Crusader, Novelist, and Journalist. , (front) , In this house Albion Tourgée lived many of his formative years. He was born about 30 miles south in Williamsfield in 1838. His family moved here in 1847 and he attended Kingsville Academy, where he met his future wife Emma Kilbourne. He served in two Union regiments, the 27th NYVI and the 105th OVI, and then moved to North Carolina after the war. There he rewrote the state constitution. to include civil rights guarantees, served as a judge, and fought the Ku Klux Klan. He began his writing career in N.C., authoring his first two novels, the most famous of which was A Fool's Errand, a highly autobiographical account of his days as a "carpetbagger." (Continued on other side). (back) (Continued from other side). In 1881 Tourgée moved to Mayville. N.Y., and continued his eclectic career. For a time he was a newspaper columnist and the publisher of a weekly news magazine, Our Continent. He was the lead attorney for Homer Plessy in the infamous case of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Plessy was an African American who sued for the right to ride in a "whites only" railroad car. Though Plessy lost, the legal basis for segregation, using much of Tourgée's legal reasoning, was later overturned in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In his brief for the Plessy case, Tourgée coined the phrase "color-blind justice” to describe what should be the national norm. In 1897 Tourgée was appointed consul to Bordeaux, France, where he served until his death in 1905.