In the Land of Jim Crow First Edition - Ray Sprigle - Bauman Rare Books

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In the Land of Jim Crow

Ray SPRIGLE

Item#: 114292 We're sorry, this item has been sold

In the Land of Jim Crow

"FEAR WAS THE LESSON THAT I LEARNED FIRST AND THE LESSON THAT I LEARNED BEST"

SPRIGLE, Ray. In the Land of Jim Crow. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949. Octavo, original red paper boards, original dust jacket.

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). It was a time when "the best white print journalists in the North and South, including Sprigle, had neglected, ignored, or not noticed the unconstitutional and shameful elephant in the national newsroom." Over a decade before publication of Griffin's Black Like Me (1961), Sprigle, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for uncovering Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black's KKK past, used suntannng sessions to turn his skin dark. Once in the South, Dobbs introduced him 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, where "fear walks beside the black man in the Southland from his earliest boyhood to the bed in which he dies. And fear was the lesson that I learned first and the lesson that I learned best in my four-week lifetime as Negro in the South." Foreword by Margaret Halsey. Serialized in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the same year under the title, "I was a Negro in the South for 30 Days." First edition, with no statement of edition or printing on the copyright page. Not in Blockson.

Book fine, only lightest edge-wear to bright about-fine dust jacket.

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Aquatint Copperplate process by which the plate is “bitten” by exposure to acid. By changing the areas of the plate that are exposed and the length of time the plate is submerged in the acid bath, the engraver can obtain fine and varying shades of gray that closely resemble watercolor washes. Although the name contains the word “tint”, this is a black-and-white printing process; aquatint plates can often be hand colored, however.
Armorial Used to describe a binding bearing the coat of arms of the original owner, or with bookplates incorporating the owner’s arms.
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Boards Hard front and rear covers of a bound book which are covered in cloth, leather or paper. “Original boards” refers to cardboard-like front and back boards, from about 1700 to 1840, used as temporary protection for books before their purchasers would have them bound. Of particular value to collectors as evidence of a very early form of the book.
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Wood-Engraving Engraving made with the graver or burin on the cross-section of a piece of boxwood; the harder wood and finer tools allow for more delicate, finely detailed images, while the block can still be set in the page alongside text and printed on the same stock as the text. While much older, wood engravings enjoyed an important renaissance in the late eighteenth century through Thomas Bewick and continued in popularity thorugh the nineteenth century.
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