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African American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 18531963. By Albert S. Broussard. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998. x, 244 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-7006-0916-4.)
As the introduction to this rich narrative reminds us, African American families are drastically understudied. Albert S. Broussard's well-researched mosaic of the Stewarts is an attempt to remedy that problem, and it serves to remind historians of the benefits and pitfalls of this subfield.
The patriarch of the family, Thomas McCants Stewart (known as T McCants), was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1853 and is unquestionably an exceptional nineteenthcentury African American. As a lawyer, minister, emigrationist, writer, and lecturer, his life intersected with many of the best-known figures of antebellum and Reconstruction America: Booker T Washington, T Thomas Fortune, and Francis J. Grimke, to name a few. The first five chapters...