Rising Above Color.
[Roosevelt, Eleanor]. Lotz, Philip Henry, editor. Rising Above Color. New York: Association Press/Fleming H. Revell Company, 1943.
8vo.; blue cloth, extremities very lightly worn; edgeworn brown and cream dust-jacket, one closed tear to spine, chip to rear panel. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this collection of biographical sketches of thirteen “exceptional” African-Americans, a number in Revell’s “Creative Personalities Series.” A presentation copy, inscribed: To Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt-from William R. Barbour/Pres. Fleming H. Revell Co. Washington D.C. Jan.26/43. Barbour took over as president from his uncle Fleming H. Revell, the founder of the company and the preeminent religious publisher in America. The house, to overcome wartime staffing problems, joined forces in March of 1943 with the Association Press (of the YMCA) to publish trade books. However, the six contributors to Rising Above Color and Lotz were all religious educators, and the “Creative Personalities Series” was meant for the “inspiration and enjoyment of young people in particular,” and includes discussion questions and bibliographies for use in classrooms.
The figures covered are George Washington Carver, Marian Anderson, W. E. B. DuBois, Robert Russa Moton, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass, Daniel Hale Williams, Booker T. Washington, Roland Hayes, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Walter White. The sketches were meant to “cultivate a better understanding between the white and Negro races, and to promote a finer appreciation of the Negro and his contribution to American life and civilization” (p. viii), a goal no doubt readily embraced by Eleanor. In fact, the inclusion of Marian Anderson in this volume makes it particularly fitting as a gift for Eleanor who not only resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution when they refused to allow Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall, but also helped arrange the historic concert at the Lincoln Memorial at which Anderson sang for a crowd of 75,000.
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