African-American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853-1963.

African-American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853-1963. By Albert S. Broussard. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, c. 1998. Pp. x, 244. $29.95, ISBN 0-7006-0916-4.)

This book is a useful, interesting survey of one African American family across three generations. While it tells us very little about blacks in the South or about the South generally, it does explore class and gender relations, patriarchy, values transmission inside families, sibling relations, and occupational roles within the household and broader society. The Stewarts, Albert Broussard persuasively argues, were a remarkable family--not just because they were a family of elites, what Willard B. Gatewood has called "aristocrats of color" (p. 3), but because the story of these generations reveals some of the racist obstacles that confronted members of an aspiring, materially and socially ambitious black middle class throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America.

Broussard's book attempts to fill what he perceives as a void in the study of black families in America. While acknowledging the works of Herbert Gutman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Carl N. Degler, Alex Haley, and others on women, blacks, and families in America, Broussard argues that too little has been done on black families and their trials and struggles in the United States. While he ironically criticizes some works on blacks for allowing themselves to be defined by white racism and impediments, ultimately he, too, stresses that the major worth in writing and studying the Stewarts is in appreciating the racial obstacles that were put into the paths of disparate family members as they sought to perpetuate an elite role within black society and the local communities in which they lived. In other words, Broussard also allows white racism, in a fundamental way, to define his work.

Over half the book is concerned with the life of T. McCants Stewart, the fascinating and authoritarian patriarch of the family. The elder Stewart, who was born and reared in Charleston, South Carolina, but made his mark in New York, Hawaii, Liberia, and England, makes for fascinating biography. A lawyer, minister, civil rights activist, and emigrationist, T. McCants Stewart cultivated close friendships with some of the most influential black leaders of his day--Booker T. Washington, T. Thomas Fortune, and Francis J. Grimke--and became a leading national black spokesperson himself. A curious mixture of black separatist and activist, Stewart espoused emigration to Liberia but also confided to one of his sons that "the Negro's only hope of equality of opportunity lies in [racial] amalgamation" (p. 85).

None of the other Stewarts ever reached the stature of T. McCants Stewart. Eldest son McCants Stewart was an attorney consistently frustrated in his attempts at financial and professional improvement. Daughter Carlotta Stewart Lai achieved remarkable success as an educator in racially diverse Hawaii over a forty-year career. Second son, Gilchrist Stewart, is perhaps the most interesting. A mediocre attorney, he eventually became a civil rights activist of national repute, fell out with his father's (and his) friend Booker T. Washington after using the Tuskegee name to raise money for himself, and was exceptionally active in the New York NAACP, the Niagara Movement, and the Constitution League. His father's assessment of Gilchrist, harsh and uncompromising, perhaps tells us more about the elder Stewart than it does about Gilchrist: "As to Chris, he is no good. Not unlucky. He lacks character" (p. 142). Chapters on a third generation, Katherine Stewart Flippin and her husband Robert Flippin, round out the study.

Broussard perhaps missed several opportunities to tie his middle-class blacks to European counterparts, "a nobility of the robe" that also rose through conscious attempts at making good marriage matches and harbored some of the same noblesse oblige, paternalism, and even snobbism toward the lower classes as the Stewarts. But, overall, the book is a useful study that illuminates several areas of interesting inquiry.

GLENN FELDMAN

University of Alabama at Birmingham