February 2021 Catalogue

B a u m a n R a r e B o o k s B l a c k A m e r i c a n a 2 0 2 1 41 “Fear Was The Lesson That I Learned First And The Lesson That I Learned Best” 55. SPRIGLE, Ray. In the Land of Jim Crow. New York, 1949. Octavo, original red paper boards, dust jacket. $650. C lick for M ore I nfo First edition of the award-winning Pittsburgh journalist’s searing and groundbreaking report on the “bloodstained tragedy” of racism in the Jim Crow South, published over a decade before Griffin’s Black Like Me, in original dust jacket. In 1948 white journalist Ray Sprigle met with NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White for help in his plan to travel as a black man in the South. Walter White then turned to black civil rights leader John Wesley Dobbs to be Springle’s guide as he crossed “the race line in mid-20th-century America” (Juan Williams in Steigerwald, 30 Days as a Black Man , ix-x). Over a decade before publication of Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961), Dobbs introduced Springle to “black doctors and undertakers, to sharecroppers, and to the families of lynching victims… what Sprigle was seeing made him ashamed to be an American” (Steigerwald,1-12). He writes bluntly of the “bloodstained tragedy” of Jim Crow. Gift inscription. Book very fresh; light edge-wear with chipping to spine head and upper front panel of elusive dust jacket. A near-fine copy. An “Essential Document Of Contemporary American Life” 56. GRIFFIN, John Howard. Black Like Me. Boston, 1961. Octavo, original white cloth, dust jacket. $850. C lick for M ore I nfo First edition of a “piercing andmemorable” account of racism in America by white writer John Howard Griffin, his record of traveling across the South in 1959 disguised as an African American, in the elusive original dust jacket. In1959Griffin, awhitewriter, darkenedhisskintoprepare fora journey across the South disguised as an African American. His chilling record of the experience, Black Like Me, “told white Americans what they had long refused to believe.” After sending his family to Mexico for their safety, he joined them and “turned his Sepia articles into Black Like Me . In October 1961, Black Like Me was published, to wide acclaim. The New York Times hailed it as an ‘essential document of contemporary American life.’ Newsweek called it ‘piercing and memorable’…. Black Like Me remains a remarkable document. Griffin changed more than the color of his skin. He helped change the way America saw itself” ( Smithsonian Magazine ). Small faint notation to rear endpaper. Text very fresh with mere trace soiling to cloth; edge-wear, mild toning to spine of bright dust jacket. A near- fine copy.