Printed and Manuscript Americana

Cortland, New York: Lelover & Schutt, (1889). Albumen cabinet card portrait on original mount, inscribed by DeMond on verso: "A.L. DeMond / Trumansburg. / N.Y. / '89." 5 3/8 x 3 7/8 in. (136 x 98 mm) print on 6 1/2 x 4 1/4 in. (165 x 108 mm) mount.

A fine and scarce inscribed cabinet card of African American minister and activist Abraham Lincoln DeMond (1867-1936). Born in Covert, Seneca County, New York, DeMond was the first African American to graduate from the Cortland Normal School (now SUNY Cortland), and then went on to study theology at Howard University. He served as principal of the Lincoln School for Colored Children in Fort Payne, Alabama, where he was esteemed as a politically active pastor that championed and fought for the rights of Blacks. He then became pastor at the historic Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, the same church where nearly 50 years later Martin Luther King, Jr., would help lead the Civil Rights Movement. On January 1, 1900 DeMond delivered a speech, The Negro Element in American Life, in which he reviewed African American history as a roadmap for the nation’s future, and championed the contributions made by Blacks and antislavery figures. DeMond stressed that the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation Proclamation--those "two great patriotic, wise and humane state papers"--are the two documents of supreme importance in the nation's attainment of freedom and equality, with the latter "essential to the fulfilling of the other." "Grand as was the Declaration of Independence," DeMond writes, "lofty as were its sentiments and sweeping as were its statements, it was unsatisfactory, its very wording a battle ground of controversy, until the Emancipation Proclamation put the Temple of Freedom on the foundation that the fathers had laid." DeMond later served as pastor of the Plymouth Congregational Church in Charleston, South Carolina; the First Congregational Church in Buxton, Iowa; and the First Congregational Church of New Orleans.