"THE FIRST HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN NEW YORK CITY": FINE FIRST EDITION OF JAMES WELDON JOHNSON'S BLACK MANHATTAN
JOHNSON, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930. Octavo, original decorated gray cloth, pictorial endpapers.
First edition of Johnson's groundbreaking African American history, with 15 photographic portraits featuring W.E.B. Du Bois, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Countee Cullen and others.
Black Manhattan, "the first history of African Americans in New York City" (ANB), moves "from the Dutch landing in 1626 to the black theater milieu of the early 1900s." Paying special attention to "relation between social development and literary and artistic achievement" (Smith, 198), this was the last major work of James Weldon Johnson, the civil rights pioneer and NAACP officer whose Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) carved a distinctive niche in the African American canon. Without scarce dust jacket. Blockson 2373. Owner bookplate.
A fine copy.