The 8th Annual Sylvia R. Frey Lecture: Daniel Brook

The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South welcomes urbanist, historian, journalist and author Daniel Brook to present the 8th Annual Sylvia R. Frey Lecture. His works have appeared in Harper's, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine and Slate. Brook will discuss his latest work, The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction, which discusses how our nation was birthed from a singularly narrow racial system that was forged in opposition of civil rights.

Statement from the Speaker: "In the years after the Civil War, New Orleans experienced civil rights progress unparalleled elsewhere in America. Just a decade after the city rejoined the Union, a coalition of multiracial activists had successfully integrated the city's streetcars, police department, and public schools. Daniel Brook will retrace this remarkable history and explore how the Crescent City's unique antebellum racial system made it possible. Only with the suppression of the local Latin-American-inflected conception of race and its replacement by the Anglo-American black/white racial binary was this progress ultimately stamped out.

His last book, A History of Future Cities, was selected as one of the ten "Favorite Books of 2013" by the Washington Post. Born in Brooklyn, raised on Long Island, and educated at Yale, Brook lives in New Orleans.

For more information, contact Regina Cairns at 504-314-2854 or rcairns@tulane.edu.