Race Grit. Adventures on the Border-Land of Liberty

Philadelphia: The Judson Press, (1922). 210pp. First Edition. Small 8vo. Frontis + 19 leaves of plates; folding table. Red cloth with inset illustrated label from photograph; without rare dust jacket. Early inscription, small presentation rubber stamp; else fine condition.

First edition of this 1922 work describing Baptist missionaries and their efforts in the South to improve the lives of African Americans through education, religion, and hard work. Mission work is described in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas.

The plates, half-tones from photographs, are evocative; one image contrasts tumbled down shacks ("a civic liability") with a neat and tidy home with a car out front to represent the aspiring, upwardly-mobile Southern African American. The frontispiece shows a well-dressed Black boy standing in front, in homage, to a large statue of Abraham Lincoln. Another plate shows a college printing shop where a young man and women work with sophisticated printing machinery. The tone throughout is positive.  These are Black Southerners yearning to improve their lives, these are "...real life-stories which present the results of home missions, not simply in the cases of a few conspicuously outstanding members of the Negro race in America, but much rather among the average representatives of that people."

Work, p610. IB100