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American Travelers Guide to Negro Monuments.

Chicago: American Oil Company, 1963. 8vo (8.5” x 5.5”), printed wrappers. 34 pp. Illus. CONDITION: Very good, light wear to wrappers; contents bright and clean.

A civil rights movement era guide to black history monuments published on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963.

Described and pictured in this work are sites and monuments located in fifteen states. Some of the more prominent sites include the Harpers Ferry National Monument in West Virginia, Frederick Douglass’s home in Washington, D.C.; Harriet Tubman’s home in Auburn; New York, Sojourner Truth’s grave in Battle Creek, Michigan; John Brown’s farm and grave in North Elba, New York; and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Illustrations picture a number of the notable Black figures connected with these sites. Less well known sites include the Du Sable Marker in Chicago, marking the site of the first building in the area, the home of fur trader Jean Baptist Pointe Du Sable, a black man from San Domingo, and the Bragg Smith Marker in the “Colored Cemetery” in Columbus, Georgia (Smith lost his life attempting to “save the city engineer from a caved-in excavation, 1903”). The text notes that many of these historical sites are usually not included in conventional guidebooks nor in ordinary textbooks. Moreover, not all the attractions included are sites per se. Also listed is “a folio edition of ‘Paradise Lost’ that was presented to Phyllis Wheatley in 1773” at the Harvard University Library and the original draft of Lincoln’s preliminary emancipation proclamation at the New York State Library in Albany.

A detailed and sympathetically compiled guide, but one nevertheless also intended to steer tourists to AMOCO gas pumps.

Item #6646

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