The Accident of Color A Story of Race in Reconstruction
A technicolor history of the first civil rights movement and its collapse into black and white.
A technicolor history of the first civil rights movement and its collapse into black and white.
In The Accident of Color, Daniel Brook journeys to nineteenth-century New Orleans and Charleston and introduces us to cosmopolitan residents who elude the racial categories the rest of America takes for granted.
![Story Panel 1 Character Left](https://www.daniel-brook.com/assets/characters/story-panel-1-character-left.png)
![Story Panel 1 Character Right](https://www.daniel-brook.com/assets/characters/story-panel-1-character-right.png)
During Reconstruction, a movement arises as mixed-race elites make common cause with the formerly enslaved and allies at the fringes of whiteness in a bid to achieve political and social equality for all.
![Story Panel 2 Character Left](https://www.daniel-brook.com/assets/characters/story-panel-2-character-left.png)
![Story Panel 2 Character Right](https://www.daniel-brook.com/assets/characters/story-panel-2-character-right.png)
Activists peacefully integrate the streetcars of Charleston and New Orleans for decades and, for a time, even the New Orleans public schools and the University of South Carolina are educating students of all backgrounds side by side.
![Story Panel 3 Character Left](https://www.daniel-brook.com/assets/characters/story-panel-3-character-left.png)
![Story Panel 3 Character Right](https://www.daniel-brook.com/assets/characters/story-panel-3-character-right.png)
Tragically, the achievements of this movement are swept away by a violent political backlash and expunged from the history books, culminating in the Jim Crow laws that legalize segregation for a half century and usher in the binary racial regime that rules us to this day.
![Ransier](https://www.daniel-brook.com/assets/characters/ransier.png)
![Roudanez](https://www.daniel-brook.com/assets/characters/roudanez.png)