Albion Winegar Tourgee (2 May 1838-21 May 1905) was an American civil rights and anti-racist activist who served as a superior court judge in North Carolina from 1868 to 1874, founded Bennett College, and advocated for freedmen's rights during and after Reconstruction.
Biography[]
Albion Winegar Tourgee was born in Williamsfield, Ohio in 1838, and he was educated in Lee, Massachusetts before going to college in Rochester, New York. He served in a New York regiment of the Union Army during the American Civil War, and hw as wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861, leaving him with a permanent back problem. After the war, he moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, hoping that the warm climate would help him cope with his injuries. He became a lawyer and a civil rights activist, campaigning for African-American rights during Reconstruction; he was viewed as a "carpetbagger" by the Southern Democrats. From 1868 to 1874, he served as judge of the 7th district superior court, and the Ku Klux Klan repeatedly threatened his life. In 1873, he founded Bennett College as a normal school for freedmen. He failed in a bid for the US Congress in 1878, and, on 1 November 1890, he recognized the new Mississippi constitution as the most important event in American history since South Carolina had seceded from the Union, as the state incorporated anti-black and anti-poor literacy tests into their constitution; racist registrars could pass ignorant whites into voting and fail knowledgeable blacks into not voting. He died in 1905, having become a crusader for what he called "color-blind" justice.