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Inscribed cabinet card portrait of Rev. Abraham Lincoln DeMond.
Cortland, New York: Lelover & Schutt, (1889). Albumen print, 5.375” x 3.875” on larger gilt mount, inscribed by DeMond on verso: “A. L. DeMond. Trumansburg. N.Y. ’89.” CONDITION: Very good. A scarce and early signed cabinet card portrait of a pioneering African American activist and minister who looked to the history of Black excellence as a map for America’s future, and preached at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church fifty years before Martin Luther King, Jr. Abraham Lincoln DeMond was born in Seneca, New York in 1867, the youngest child of Quam DeMond and Phebe Cuffe Darrow (grand-niece of the famous African American and Wampanoag sea captain Paul Cuffee). After becoming the first Black graduate of what is now SUNY Cortland, DeMond studied theology at Howard University. His most famous speech—subsequently published in pamphlet form by the Emancipation Proclamation Association—was given on Jubilee Day of 1900, that is, January 1st, at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Half a century later, the church welcomed Martin Luther King, Jr. as its pastor and became the launching point for the Montgomery bus boycott and the Civil Rights movement. DeMond’s address, “The Negro Element in American Life,” lauds antislavery activists (including Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet) and examples of Black excellence (among them Phillis Wheatley and Benjamin Banneker), and situates African Americans at the heart of the nation’s progress. He frames the Emancipation Proclamation as “essential to the fulfilling” of the Declaration of Independence: “Both were born in days of doubt and darkness. Both were the outcome of injustice overleaping the bounds of right and reason…Without the Declaration of Independence the nation could not have been born; without the Emancipation Proclamation it could not have lived.” DeMond served as pastor of the First Congregational Church in Montgomery, Alabama; the Plymouth Congregational Church in Charleston, South Carolina; the First Congregational Church of New Orleans; and the First Congregational Church in the extraordinary town of Buxton, the “Black man’s utopia in Iowa.” He and his wife, Selma University graduate and music teacher Lula Watkins Patterson, had five children. DeMond died in 1936. The cabinet card offered here shows a young, mustachioed DeMond in crisp white collar and dark suit, his hair parted at the center. Taken by Lelover & Schutt of Cortland, New York, this portrait may have been made upon DeMond’s graduation from the Cortland Normal School in June of 1899. A month later, his mother died in Trumansburg, New York, a town in which they had briefly stayed following the death of his father in 1877, and where Phebe had returned in 1886. After his mother’s passing, DeMond preached to a packed Methodist Church there, and probably signed this card during the same stay. A wonderful early portrait of this soon-to-be influential Black minister, signed by him the year he became the first Black graduate of what is now SUNY Cortland. REFERENCES: “Abraham Lincoln DeMond” and “Phebe Cuffe (Darrow) DeMond” at WikiTree online; “Abraham Lincoln DeMond, Minister and Activist” at African American Registry online.
Item #10055
Price: $1,750.00
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