Bricks Without Straw

Bricks Without Straw

A Novel

  • Author: Karcher, Carolyn L.; Tourgée, Albion W.; Tourgée , Albion W.
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822343950
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822392347
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2009
  • Month: May
  • Pages: 464
  • DDC: 813/.4
  • Language: English
A classic of American political fiction first published in 1880, a mere three years after Reconstruction officially ended, Bricks Without Straw offers an inside view of the struggle to create a just society in the post-slavery South. It is unique among the white-authored literary works of its time in presenting Reconstruction through the eyes of emancipated slaves. As a leading Radical Republican, the author, Albion W. Tourgée, played a key role in drafting a democratized Constitution for North Carolina after the Civil War, and he served as a state superior court judge during Reconstruction. Tourgée worked closely with African Americans and poor whites in the struggle to transform North Carolina’s racial and class politics. He saw the ravages of the Ku Klux Klan firsthand, worked to bring the perpetrators of Klan atrocities to justice, and fought against what he called the “counter-revolution” that destroyed Reconstruction.

Bricks Without Straw is Tourgée’s 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. This edition of Bricks Without Straw is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher’s introduction, which sets the novel in historical context and provides an overview of Albion W. Tourgée’s career, a chronology of the significant events of both the Reconstruction era and Tourgée’s life, and explanatory notes identifying actual events fictionalized in the novel.

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Note on the Text
  • Introduction
  • Chronology
  • Bricks Without Straw
    • Chapter 1
    • Chapter 2
    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Chapter 10
    • Chapter 11
    • Chapter 12
    • Chapter 13
    • Chapter 14
    • Chapter 15
    • Chapter 16
    • Chapter 17
    • Chapter 18
    • Chapter 19
    • Chapter 20
    • Chapter 21
    • Chapter 22
    • Chapter 23
    • Chapter 24
    • Chapter 25
    • Chapter 26
    • Chapter 27
    • Chapter 28
    • Chapter 29
    • Chapter 30
    • Chapter 31
    • Chapter 32
    • Chapter 33
    • Chapter 34
    • Chapter 35
    • Chapter 36
    • Chapter 37
    • Chapter 38
    • Chapter 39
    • Chapter 40
    • Chapter 41
    • Chapter 42
    • Chapter 43
    • Chapter 44
    • Chapter 45
    • Chapter 46
    • Chapter 47
    • Chapter 48
    • Chapter 49
    • Chapter 50
    • Chapter 51
    • Chapter 52
    • Chapter 53
    • Chapter 54
    • Chapter 55
    • Chapter 56
    • Chapter 57
    • Chapter 58
    • Chapter 59
    • Chapter 60
    • Chapter 61
    • Chapter 62
  • Annotations
  • Index

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