Author Carolyn Karcher Speaks at SU Thursday, October 6

SALISBURY, MD---Author Carolyn Karcher speaks on her book A Refugee From His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight Against White Supremacy Thursday, October 6, at Salisbury University.

Part of the SU Student Government Association’s Unity Through Diversity program, her presentation is 6 p.m. in Perdue Hall’s Bennett Family Auditorium.

A Union Army Civil War veteran, Tourgée was one of the nation’s most well-known Euro American activists for African Americans during Reconstruction and into the early 20th century. Acclaimed as “one of the best friends of the Afro-American people this country has ever produced,” according to Karcher, the attorney, farmer and writer was reviled by many white Southerners as a race traitor.

He collaborated closely with African Americans in founding an interracial civil rights organization 18 years before the inception of the NAACP, in campaigning against lynching alongside Ida B. Wells and Cleveland Gazette editor Harry C. Smith, and in challenging the ideology of segregation as lead counsel for the plaintiff in the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case.

Library Journal hailed A Refugee From His Race as “highly recommended for both subject specialists and all readers interested in the biracial fight for equality long before the modern Civil Rights Movement.”

Karcher is professor emerita of English, American studies and women's studies at Temple University, where she taught for 21 years. There, she received the Great Teacher Award and the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2002. She also is an internationally-known Herman Melville and Lydia Maria Child scholar, authoring the groundbreaking  books Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s American and The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child.

She has also edited modern reprints of many 19th-century works, including Tourgée’s novel about Black Reconstruction, Bricks Without Straw. 

Admission to her talk is free, and the public is invited. For more information call 410-543-6030 or visit the SU website at www.salisbury.edu.