American Historical Ephemera & Photography, including African Americana

GRIFFITHS, Julia (1811-1895), editor. Autographs for Freedom. Boston and Cleveland: John P. Jewett & Company and Jewett, Proctor, and Worthington, 1853.

8vo (191 x 114 mm). Original blind-stamped brown cloth (spine partially detached with missing sections, text-block starting at center, rubbing). Provenance: Lodie Maureen Biggs (1895-1971), civil rights activist and bookseller (gift inscription).

FIRST EDITION. INSCRIBED BY CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST RICHARD B. MOORE TO LODIE M. BIGGS, "To a staunch co-worker and a proven friend. With warm greetings and best wishes for a Happy Birthday and many more still happier." Richard Benjamin Moore (1893-1978) was born in Barbados and emigrated to the United States when he was sixteen years old. Though trained in clerical work the racial prejudices of many American employers forced him into more menial jobs; these experiences would make him a strong advocate for African American rights and would lead into such organizations as the anti-lynching African Blood Brotherhood and the Socialist Party. In 1942 he met Lodie Maureen Biggs, a bookseller and activist from Seattle who had helped revive the dormant Seattle branch of the NAACP. That same year they founded the Frederick Douglass Book Center in Harlem, and shortly after both were kicked out of the Communist Party for Moore's perceived African-American nationalist views. The two married in 1950 and remained so until Lodie's death in 1971.

Autographs for Freedom is the second compilation of essays and poems issued by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. Essays include, "Visit of a Fugitive Slave to the Grave of Wilberforce" by William Wells Brown; "The Intellectual, Moral, and spiritual Condition of the Slave" by John Mercer Langston; "A Time of Justice Will Come" by Gerrit Smith; two pieces by Charles Lewis Reason; "On Freedom" by Ralph Waldo Emerson; an extract from a speech by Frederick Douglass; "A Day Spent at Playford Hall" by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Afro-Americana 4369; Blockson 9205.