American Daughter.
Thompson, Era Bell. American Daughter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1946).
8vo.; blue cloth; orange, white and black pictorial dust-jacket, lightly rubbed, small chip to top of spine.
First edition of this scarce post-War black female autobiography. Era Bell Thompson, writer, civil rights and labor rights advocate, and senior editor for Ebony magazine, was born to a large, working-class black family in 1899. The grandchild of slaves, Thompson was part of the first truly emancipated generation of Negroes born in America. In American Daughter Thompson tells of her development from a shy, rural girl into an outgoing and mature sophisticate who would eventually pursue a career in journalism. Thompson emphasizes her struggles with racism and sexism in her professional and personal life, as well as her battle to defeat anti-white and anti-Semitic sentiments within herself and among other blacks.
As an author and a theorist Thompson was an early convert to the principles of modern-day feminism: she regularly stresses the validity of the personal in the political, and she consistently documents the intersecting nature and mechanisms of socially-constructed prejudices, as in the following passage:
...It was Esther, the little Jewish stenographer, who first told me about Marian Anderson. Esther, herself well-read and broad about racial issues to the point of marrying a Scotchman, was amazed when I told her I had never heard of the famous singer. That night I went to her home, and a Jew, a Scotchman, and a Negro sat on the floor and listened to a phonograph while a colored girl sang. The more they talked, the more conscious I became of my ignorance of Negroes, and the more anxious they were to help me, so they loaned me books and took me to concerts and lectures, dance recitals and forums. With them I could talk freely about people and races, for they understood black hate and knew white prejudice, and, as I talked to them, the chasm narrowed. (271-272)
Thompson’s devotion to the cause of racial harmony would be lifelong: in 1963, some twenty years after the publication of American Daughter, Thompson edited the widely respected anthology White on Black: The Views of Twenty-Two White Americans on the Negro (Chicago: Johnson Publishing).
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