As I explore the older suggestions on this board, I want to credit <a href="viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4704">this post</a> for bringing the Reconstruction-era author Albion Tourgee to my attention. I had never heard of him before. What a fascinating life he led!
Albion Tourgee was a white man from Ohio who served in the Civil War and was badly wounded. After the war, he and his wife moved to Greensboro NC as the climate was thought to be better for his recovery. He also became a lawyer and an author. He also was a Radical Republican and strongly believed in bringing the forces of the US government to bear for the protection and advancement of the newly freed black citizens of the South. So he was a classic "Carpetbagger", a Northerner who came south to work on behalf of the Republicans and black people. He was active in county and state politics, was a judge for a number of years (earning the ire of and threats from the powerful local branch of the KKK), and made an unsuccessful run for Congress. He also helped found Bennett College, a historically black college in Greensboro, in 1873. It began as a coed school and became a black women's college in the early 20th century. It's still going today.
Tourgee moved to upstate New York in 1883 and this area became a setting for many of his later works.
He is probably most famous for being the lawyer who represented Homer Plessy in the Plessy v Ferguson case, ultimately arguing it before the Supreme Court. Here's what Wikipedia says about his role:
"Perhaps the nation's most outspoken white Radical on the "race question" in the late 1880s and 1890s, Tourgée had called for resistance to the Louisiana law in his widely read newspaper column, "A Bystander's Notes," which, though written for the Chicago Republican (later known as the Chicago Daily Inter Ocean and after 1872 known as the Chicago Record-Herald), was syndicated in many newspapers across the country. Largely as a consequence of this column, "Judge Tourgée" had become well known in the black press for his bold denunciations of lynching, segregation, disfranchisement, white supremacy, and scientific racism, and he was the New Orleans Citizens' Committee's first choice to lead their legal challenge to the new Louisiana segregation law. Before the case began, Tourgee played a strategic role, for instance suggesting a light-skinned person to challenge the law. Dan Desdunes, the son of prominent Citizens Committee leader Rodolphe Desdunes was initially selected, but his case was thrown out because he boarded an inter-state train and it was decided state law did not apply. Homer Plessy was then selected and he was arrested after boarding an intrastate train.
Tourgée, who was lead attorney for Homer Plessy, first deployed the term "color blindness" in his briefs in the Plessy case, and had used it on several prior occasions on behalf of the struggle for civil rights. Indeed, Tourgee's first use of "color blindness" as a legal metaphor came decades before while serving as a Superior Court judge in North Carolina. In his dissent in Plessy, Justice John Marshall Harlan borrowed the metaphor of "color blindness" from Tourgée’s legal brief."
And in all of this, he wrote a lot of books, editorials, essays and articles, including novels. Here are some of his books on Internet Archive:
A Royal Gentleman (his first novel, originally published as 'Toinette) https://archive.org/details/royalgentlemanzo00touruoft
A Fool's Errand, By One of the Fools (Probably his most famous novel, about the Reconstruction, published 1879, and a bestseller) https://archive.org/details/oneofthefools00tourrich
Bricks Without Straw (sequel to A Fool's Errand) https://archive.org/details/brickswithoutstr00tour
A Veteran and His Pipe (book collecting a series of essays from 1885, about the developments in and state of the US since the Civil War) https://archive.org/details/veteranandhispi01tourgoog
John Eax and Mamelon, or The South Without the Shadow https://archive.org/details/johneaxandmamel00tourgoog
Button's Inn https://archive.org/details/buttonsinn01tourgoog
Murvale Eastman, Christian Socialist https://archive.org/details/murvaleeastmanc00tourgoog
There are quite a few more books as well! A Fool's Errand and Bricks Without Straw are probably the most significant of his works and A Fool's Errand has specifically been requested by a listener in the past.
Colleen