The Gift of Black Folk: the Negroes in the Making of America [Niagara Movement cofounder J. Max Barber’s Copy]

Author: Du Bois, W.E.B.

Publisher: The Stratford Company

Condition: Good

Hardcover. First Edition. iv, 340pp+ index. Publisher’s blue cloth lettered in gilt. Tidemark to textblock, large dampstain to rear. A good only copy with significant association. Housed in a custom folding case. J. Max Barber was an African American civil rights activist and educator who with Du Bois and others founded the short-lived, but influential Niagara Movement in 1905. Led by Du Bois the group was named after the location of its first meeting, which took place at Niagara Falls, and its members included prominent figures such as Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and William Monroe Trotter. A precursor to the modern Civil Rights Movement, it laid the foundation for many of the strategies and tactics used in the struggle for racial justice in the decades that followed, going against what they saw as the more conservative tactic of Booker T. Washington and his allies. Barber, later on, was editor of ‘Crisis magazine and president of the NAACP Philadelphia branch from 1919 to 1921. He would also go on to become the president of the John Brown Memorial Society and continue to publish articles on racial injustice and inequality in Abbott’s Monthly between 1930 and 1933. As Barber focused more on his professional dental practice later in, his involvement in social movements became less frequent, and who he isn’t as widely known as one of the stars of the early civil rights movement, there’s no doubt that his place was of utmost importance as any others from the time.