Printed & Manuscript African Americana (Swann Galleries)

524 Lots. Highlights include a Civil War-period carte-de-visite album that includes two photographs of Harriet Tubman (one unrecorded), an exceptional autograph letter signed by Frederick Douglass, a signed and inscribed first edition of Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (first editions of this title come around but signed and inscribed is extremely rare), carte-de-viste photogaph of Isabella Baumfre (“Soujourner Truth”), some exceptional Martin Luther King material, including a working draft of King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail,  (lot 260), an extensive archive of papers from the Montgomery Improvement Association (lot 256),  an extraordinary home-made sign made in support of the Selma Montgomery March (lot 273), an example of the famous I AM A MAN placard (lot 284), and two manuscripts by for Malcolm X’s “God’s Angry Men” columns published by the Los Angeles Herald Dispatch in the summer of 1957 (both manuscripts with annotations and corrections).

FROM LEADING DEALERS:

A collection of press releases issued for the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (August 28, 1963), offered by Between the Covers.

An autograph manuscript for a page for M.L.K.’s first book, A Stride Toward Freedom, offered by Seth Kaller.

An early edition of Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom, the second of his three autobiographies, with an inscription (but no signature) from Douglass to Zerviah Temple Watkeys, offered by Jeffrey Marks.