Social Reformer, Author. He is remembered for being outspoken in support for Civil Rights during the Reconstruction years after the American Civil War. He was attending the University of Rochester, New York when the Civil War began. He was a Republican and while in college wrote an essay, which was published in Hinton Rowan Helper's "The Impending Crisis of the South" that was published in 1859. He received his degree from the University of Rochester in 1862. He enlisted in the Union Army, being mustered in as a Private in Company E, 27th New York Volunteer Infantry in May of 1861. He fought at the July of 1861 First Battle of Bull Run, where he was severely wounded with a spinal injury that caused temporary paralysis followed by chronic back pain for the rest of his life. Discharged in August of 1861, he married, became a father of one child, and recovered enough over the next year to re-enlist in the fight to preserve the Union. Commissioned as a 1st Lieutenant in Company G, 105th Ohio Volunteer Infantry in August of 1862, he was again wounded at the October of 1862 Battle of Perryville, Kentucky. In January of 1863 he was captured by Confederate forces near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and was imprisoned for five months at the infamous Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. Exchanged in May of 1863, he participated in the August and September of 1863 Chattanooga and Chickamauga Campaign, but was compelled to resign his commission on December of 1863 due to disability from his injuries. After his return to Ohio, he studied law and was admitted to the Ohio State Bar Association. In 1865 at the advice of his physician, he relocated to a warmer climate in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he built a law practice and was an editor of a newspaper. He gained a reputation for fighting for social reform and social justice, especially for the newly freed African-Americans. These injustices against African-Americans were the social norms of the citizens of North Carolina and going against these norms often brought him into dangerous conflict. As a representative at the 1868 North Carolina Constitution Convention reforms, he advocated and pushed successfully for the new State Constitution, which was very slow in being put into actual practice. In 1868 he was appointed as a Superior Court Judge for the 7th Judicial District, and in this capacity, he frequently dealt with and opposed the Ku Klux Klan, which operated with much support in the area and gave a systematic campaign of terror to the African-Americans. He started writing about these experiences in the 1870s, and produced a number of successful novels dealing with Reconstruction. In 1879, he left North Carolina and returned to New York to publish his most well-known novel "A Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools." At this point, he was writing speeches for the Republican party, gave lectures along with writing columns in newspapers. By the 1880s he was the most prominent and most vocal white advocate for African-American civil rights and for social justice. In 1896 he represented plaintiff Homer Plessy in the landmark "Plessy vs Ferguson," which eventually produced the United States Supreme Court ruling that confirmed racial segregation "separate but equal" under the law, and saw the rise of Jim Crow laws. These Jim Crow laws would not be overturned until 1954 in "Brown vs the Board of Education" ruling that segregation would be ruled unconstitutional. During the case, he introduced the concept of "color blind justice" into the Nation's legal discourse. In 1897 he was appointed by President William McKinley as United States Consul to France, a post he held until his death in Paris in 1905. In 1965 Otto H. Olsen published his biography "Carpet-bagger's Crusade: The Life of Albion Winegar Tourgee." On January 6, 2022 Louisiana Governor Bel Edwards signed the posthumous pardon for Plessy near the site of the 1896 arrest with the statement "there is no expiration on justice."