Book Report: "Separate" by Steve Luxenberg

This book engrosses us in the lives of two notable civil rights whities—the activist/writer/lawyer/crackpot Albion Tourgée, and the Kentuckyan supreme court judge John Harlan. These guys both lived through America's Civil War, & then through its Reconstruction, then through a couple years of the 'SEPARATE BUT EQUAL' doctrine for which this book is named.

Albion was a major war fetishist 'dulce decorum est' sorta dude in his early life, a Northerner who rushed to serve the Union side during the Civil War. Thruout his life he tends to embody what the singer Louis Cole might call 'failing in a cool way', & we see it most brilliantly here because he critically wounds himself during the very first battle of the war! On the far side of this battlefield is one Brigadier General Thomas Jackson, who's about to earn his nickname 'Stonewall' by standing real still whilst getting shot in the hand (also by routing the union force); that means on Albion's side there is a great gaggle of retreating yankees, & it's during this retreat where he gets struck by a cart and becomes near-paralyzed in his legs.

Albion will recover somewhat, try rushing back to duty, relapse completely, then miraculously recover somewhat (apparently this was thanks to taking small doses of a new experimental drug called STRYCHNINE lol). He'd once again re-enter the damn war, survive said war & after this continue walking (with help of mobility aids!) for the remainder of this life.

Despite being a war fetishist and a lawyer, Albion's actually a pretty interesting dude! He spends the Reconstruction years in North Carolina, serving as a pro-Northern judge a.k.a. a carpetbagger. Albion wages serious conflicts against the Ku Klux Klan, & they threaten his family's lives but he doesn't care because in many ways he's just a brave dumbass & he risks his family's health/safety all the time (this is back when the KKK was at its zenith: not just some gaggle of loud & abusive assholes, but rather an active deathsquad).

Albion writes a lot of spicy books and newspaper columns, often under anonymous pseudonyms, and this leads to 1800s twitter wars about who the real identity of x novelist/columnist might be! As with spiderman, some person will inevitably ask: 'maybe it's that weirdo, Albion Tourgée?' But this gets shut down by a chorus of people confirming that Albion definitely sucks too much as a writer to have been the anonymous person in question. Basically we've got a spicy Online personality here with a large share of haters (particularly in the South), & these folks will go on to celebrate all Albion's many mistakes thruout the rest of life. Albion was an influencer, and for this reason he was often in debt + his quality-of-life often sucked tremendously! (He regularly writes of being suicidal which, hey, mood.)

Harlan is a bit more milquetoast in comparison; he's sort of a 'reformed enslaver' type whitey who came up in the South. He was a war fetishist like Albion: Indeed he ran around & recruited a whole-ass regiment of dudes to go die in that conflict. But Harlan didn't do this in the name of abolition; he was more about 'KEEPING THE UNION INTACT'. To me this boils down to his being the child of privilege, & thus dreaming as many privileged people do about creating some sort 'middle way' that can work for, y'know... 'everybody'. After the war Harlan practices a bunch of law but also gets into Republican politics (they were the lefties back then!) & so winds up becoming a bit lefty himself as the decades wear on.

Harlan's well-connected & quite good at his legal work, so he manages to get appointed to the supreme court and he serves for 33 years or so. Despite Harlan being rather tepid as a civil rights whitey (at least compared to Albion who NEVER SHUTS UP about civil rights), his Republican politics make him basically the leftiest member of this court for the entire time he's on it! Some folks today call him "The Great Dissenter", which is not what he called himself (& I think is too congratulatory of the supreme court); but in any case it's true that while all his contemporaries are busy making the awful landmark judgments that will lend justification to America's burgeoning 'SEPARATE BUT EQUAL' doctrine, Judge Harlan is here to offer 1 dissenting opinion. Whereas the majority concludes stuff like "having crappy 'Jim Crow' passenger cars at the back of the train is NOT racist!", Harlan writes dissents along the lines of "hey guys that's obviously extremely racist tho, idk?"

Today we view a certain one of his cases, "Plessy v Ferguson" from 1896, as being the landmark decision that upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the 'SEPARATE BUT EQUAL' doctrine. Most journalists & editors at the time completely overlooked the case (working as they did for white supremacists, or else being white supremacists themselves!); to these folks it was just another in a long line of similar judgments that weren't worth mentioning at all. But what's cool about this case from our PoV is that the lawyer picked to argue it before the august supreme court whities is none other than the activist/writer/lawyer/crackpot Albion Tourgée!

Albion makes many arguments that all the white people present judge to be 'crazy', even though he's right about every point he makes. These include the simple assertion that the U.S. constitution had in fact been amended after the war in order to grant Black people equal rights! It seems kinda obvious to us in retrospect that indeed the civil war resulted in laws meant to grant Black people identical protections & accomodations in society to those enjoyed by whiteys... but y'know, these whities had long been pretending that the 13th and 14th amendments meant something much more ridiculously-limited (along the lines of "THERE COULD BE SOMEWHAT LESS CHATTEL SLAVERY!") so to them this was all 'crazy' stuff. The court rules against Albion 7-1 (a predictable result, because the supreme court is & has always been profoundly racist!). But nonetheless, Harlan is there to give one of his signature dissents & u know, it'll be LEGALLY USEFUL way-too-many-years later in 1953.

This book notes that the Tourgée-Harlan connection we observe thruout this case might be ground zero for the hopeful/problematic notion of 'colorblindness' within American politics (because Tourgée uses the term as part of his arguments, & Harlan then reuses it as part of his dissent). That phrase is certainly going to be annoying for everybody later on; but as of 1896 it's a total non-starter, because it'll still be 50 years before the potential for state 'colorblindness' can even exist. Not til 1953 will "Brown v Board of Education" come along to overturn bits of "Plessy v Ferguson", legally codifying the very-basic premise that people from the 1800s already knew: YES segregation is racist (obviously), & YES it does violate the 14th amendment (obviously).

"SEPARATE" is a great book that for me sheds a bit of new light on what 'Reconstruction' was really about! For me the lesson to take away is that nobody should respect this court system (especially not the supreme court); no one should regard the courts as arbiters of 'justice', the way those folks like to see themselves! Few judges are ever out here doing what's just, nor doing what's 'right' or anything like that; judges & prosecutors & law enforcers etc are only here to help justify practices that powerful people deem to be 'normal'. For as long as enslaving people was 'normal', the courts + cops upheld it; & for as long as segregation was 'normal', the courts + cops upheld it. Today it's the prison-industrial complex etc, but since the beginning it's always been some awful thing & the courts + the cops have always simply upheld it. It never seems to matter that these practices are wrong; certainly it doesn't matter whether one "Great Dissenter" partook in some 7-1 votes during the 1800s (this does little if anything to help redeem the system overall, since the fact of the matter is that these orgs still upheld uninterrupted segregation for like ~80 years beginning post-civil war and that means they did a bad job for 80 years).

Even in Albion's day people saw that these practices were unconstitutional; they've been unconstitutional since not long after the Civil War. Yet the U.S. justice system and in particular the supreme court upholds them for decades & decades, because the U.S. justice system & in particular the supreme court kinda sucks ass. It has not done a good job in the past; it is not doing a good job in the present. These flowery words about 'justice' have all been bullshit. As it stands, the court & these judges are a bad joke. And they've always been a bad joke, right? So the question really becomes: Which details about that court are even worth preserving? Seems to me someone should fix/replace the whole thing. Do it over from scratch; how could it really be any worse than this one?