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200A
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(CALIFORNIA) BEASLEY
DELILAH L.
The Negro Trail Blazers
of California.
Illustrated. 317 pages.Tall
8vo, original pictorial yellow-orange
cloth; binding slightly discolored, rear
cover with some rippling, long “tear-
sheet” review from the Grizzly Bear
Magazine loosely laid in
Los Angeles, 1919
[1,500/2,500]
FIRST EDITION OF A SCARCE AND
IMPORTANT BOOK WITH A PAGE
-
LONG
PRESENTATION ON THE FRONT PASTE
-
DOWN
:
“To the Young Colored Men’s
Christian Club of Coatesville, Penn. and
Miss Ann Harlan former secretary of
Y.W.C.A. of Coatesville Penn. In fond
memory of my visit to this city and the several
addresses delivered before this Club, the Men’s
Bible classes of the M.E. Churches (Sunday
schools) and the Twilight Service at the First
Baptist Church of Coatesville Penn. To the
Club members when ever they should be faced
with a problem that seems insurmountable,
remember I spent ten years and ten months in
writing this book. But it has been accepted in
the libraries of the world. God bless you all,
Delilah L. Beasley, Oct. 26, 1925.”
Beasley (1871-1934) journalist and
historian, was born in Cincinnati, and wrote
for several papers—her first article published
at 12—but primarily for the Oakland,
California Tribune, which she represented at
the National Convention ofWomenVoters in
Richmond,Virginia in 1925—the only black
woman—and later the same year at the
International Council of Women at
Washington D.C. In addition to her
newspaper work and exhaustive research for
this book, Beasley was a tireless activist for
Civil Rights and “strove to end the use of
derogatory words like ‘darky’ and ‘nigger’ in
American newspapers.”(Frank Schubert, in
the Dictionary of American Negro Biography,
pages 34-35.) Cowan, page 40; Zamorano
Select, 4; Eberstadt 107:19.