Gate City Journal
The Gate City Carpetbagger
Albion Tourgée was a voice crying for racial justice in the wilderness of the Reconstructed South, a hundred years before his time
By Scott Romine
When the
Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of segregation in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, few Americans were as despondent as Albion W. Tourgée. As the lead attorney for Homer Plessy, a lightskinned African American arrested for entering a white-only train car in Louisiana, Tourgée had argued for what he called “color-blind justice,” only to find that a majority of justices were blind to his logic.
“What will it require,” he asked in a public letter, “to obliterate this last judicial crime by which it is sought to bind the colored citizen and cast him down again, helpless and irremediable under the oppression of a ‘white man’s government’?” Tourgée’s path to the Supreme Court involved a long stay in Greensboro, where he arrived in 1865 following service as a Union officer during the Civil War. His motives for moving south were many: He sought to make money, to find a healthier climate for his wife and — most of all — to spread his creed of free labor and equal citizenship to a region he regarded as benighted and barbaric. After consulting Governor William W. Holden, he decided to locate in Greensboro because of its prominent Quaker community. The Unionist and abolitionist principles of the Quakers, he felt, would aid in his reform efforts. Purchasing a house south of downtown near what is now Martin Luther King Drive, he began West Green Nursery, a firm that grew fruit and ornamental shrubbery. Paying decent wages to a mostly African-American workforce proved unpopular among local whites accustomed to a regime of
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
slave labor, and business difficulties plagued the firm throughout its existence. Although unsuccessful financially, West Green Nursery nonetheless left its mark on the city. There in 1865 Tourgée began the city’s first school for African Americans. Officially founded in 1873 in the basement of Warnersville Methodist Episcopal Church North (now St. Matthew’s United Methodist), the school would become Bennett College, moving to its present location five years later. In 1865, Tourgée assisted the Quaker, Yardley Warner, in establishing a land development for African Americans on the southern edge of West Green Nursery. He later served as president of the North Carolina Handle Company, a firm that employed many black residents living in what would come to be known as Warnersville. In 1867, Tourgée branched out to journalism, founding the Union Register to compete with the The Greensboro Patriot, a paper that regularly denounced the actions of the city’s most notorious carpetbagger. What earned him that label was an active involvement in state and national politics. Although Southern whites were eager for Northern investors, association with Reconstruction governance usually placed Northern immigrants beyond the social pale. Tourgée further scandalized local conservatives in 1869 when he legally adopted a former slave, Adaline Patillo, as his daughter. Salacious rumors about Tourgée and the “yaller girl” echoed in the conservative press. Never one to hide his opinions, he spoke loudly and often in support of African-American rights and, at least initially, for the disenfranchisement of former Confederates. Active in the 1868 convention that rewrote the state constitution to favor Radical Republicans, Tourgée began in the same year a term as superior court justice. Although admired for his legal acumen and personal bravery, he lived under the constant threat of Klan violence. Traveling to Washington, D.C., in 1871, he bore witness of Klan outrages to President Ulysses S. Grant and Congressional investigators. Although federal anti-Klan legislation markedly reduced racial terrorism in the region, Governor Holden was successFebruary 2015
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