Black Reconstruction.
Inscribed To Eleanor Roosevelt
By NAACP Leader Walter White
[Roosevelt, Eleanor]. DuBois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, (1935).
Thick 8vo.; blue cloth, stamped in silver; lightly soiled.
First edition of DuBois’s historical opus, the work that “set the course of profoundly shaping radical reconstruction historiography”: Aptheker 1964; #72, Blockson’s 101 Influential Books.
A magical presentation copy, inscribed: "For Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, with the admiration for her great courage and humanity, Walter White. Black author and activist White became the NAACP Executive Secretary in 1931."
Eleanor Roosevelt genuinely admired White, who served, during the mid-20th-century, as the true powerhouse and bulwark of the NAACP. She once commented that “the sorrows of his people [were] close to his heart...and if I were colored, I think I should have written about the same obsession that he has.” For his part, White regarded Mrs. Roosevelt as the hope of the New Deal’s promise of civil rights reform–it was she, he once admitted, who kept him “from hating all white people” (Lash, 518-19).
White and Eleanor collaborated on many political issues, most notably the NAACP’s Costigan-Wagner bill. In May 1935, after FDR failed to endorse publicly the delicate piece of anti-lynching legislation, Eleanor promised, apologetically, to “go on fighting.” Some months later, in admiration for her courage and for her intervention on the bill’s behalf, White presented her with this inscribed copy. (White’s choice of the DuBois title is in itself interesting, since he and the great “Race Man” had become estranged the year before, when White and others forced the too-radical DuBois from his NAACP office.) Eleanor promised “to read it [the book] as soon as I can...I will also try to get the President to read it”–the President’s response is, unfortunately, unrecorded (Correspondence of W.E.B. DuBois, by Herbert Aptheker, ed., Amherst, University of Massachusetts, 1976, Vol. 2, p. 25).
(#4432)
Print Inquire
