Please join us at the main New Orleans Public Library where journalist and author Daniel Brook will discuss his newly published book, The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction, and the research methods that enabled him to bring to life Reconstruction-era civil rights struggles in Charleston and New Orleans.  Mr. Brook will be in conversation with Greg Osborn from the Library's Louisiana Division/City Archives & Special Collections.

The imposition of the black-white binary racial system at the collapse of Reconstruction brought wrenching social, political, and personal consequences from which we are still reeling today. But it also brought an indomitable spirit of resistance.

"A technicolor history of the first civil rights movement and its collapse into black and white....The Accident of Color revisits a crucial inflection point in American history. By returning to the birth of our nation’s singularly narrow racial system, which was forged in the crucible of opposition to civil rights, Brook illuminates the origins of the racial lies we live by." - from the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

The Accident of Color will be available for purchase at the event through Octavia Books.