First edition of this picture-book history of the African diaspora, with special focus on famous Black leaders from Phillis Wheatley and Mary McLeod Bethune to Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall.
Near fine in a very good plus jacket.
Price: $4,500.00
"The Negro citizens of the United States have many beautiful schools and churches, hotels, large newspapers, and businesses. This was not always true, for, when freedom came to them, less than a hundred years ago, most Negroes did not own anything."
Langston Hughes was one of the most famous members of the Harlem Renaissance to take the literature needs of children seriously. "Faced too often by the segregation and scorn of a surrounding White world, America's Negro children are in pressing need of books that will give them back their own souls. They do not know the beauty they possess," he remarked in a 1932 article (quoted in Bishop, 67). This book, meant for younger children, provides a constellation of heroes for the reader. Booker T. Washington and Harriet Tubman get extended treatment (and indeed the book is quite careful to balance both men and women as role models) alongside general introductions to different people and cultures of the African diaspora. A wonderful compendium of conscious mythologizing for the uplifting of Black American children, scarce in the original dust jacket, and rare in this condition.
First printing. New York: Franklin Watts, Inc, 1952. 8.25'' x 7''. Original green cloth stamped in gilt to spine and front board. In original unclipped ($1.75) color pictorial dust jacket (with publisher ads on verso). Illustrated in color throughout by Koering. 70 pages (endpapers included in count). Tiny chip to rear panel, a couple short closed tears. Touches of shelfwear to extremities of book. Overall, bright, clean, and sound.
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