Sale 2503 - Printed & Manuscript African Americana, March 28, 2019

400 c   (WOMEN.) Sanders, LeEtta. Diary of a young Seattle woman. [106] pages of daily manuscript diary entries plus 5 pages of manuscript memoranda. 8vo, original cloth “Date Book for 1915,” minor damp- staining; hinges split, contents otherwise well-preserved. Seattle, WA, 1 January to 1 October 1915 [2,000/3,000] A fascinating diary by a 21-year-old African- American woman in Seattle, Washington. LeEtta Frances Sanders (1893-1978) was a Washington native, spent much of her childhood in inland Yakima, and had returned to Seattle by the time of this diary. Her life seemed largely contained within a community of middle-class and profes- sional African-Americans, something we might expect to see more in Philadelphia or Baltimore during this era than a growing western city just a few decades removed from its frontier period. She worked as a secretary for African-American attorney Andrew Raymond Black (1874-1918). Describing herself as “just a flirt” (29 March), she seems to be slowly getting over a painful breakup with machinist Horace Smith (1887- 1959) and dating a variety of young professional men. Most notably, she conducts a bizarre off- and-on romance with her dentist Felix Cooper (1888-1954), a local civil rights leader. On at least two occasions, he works on her teeth and then takes her out to dinner (10 February and 26 March), but their strangest date was 15 September: “Went up to Doctor’s office tonight and he asked me to assist him in giving an anaesthetic to a woman. I was rather anxious to see that done, although I won’t say I was of much assistance.” The diarist’s response to Seattle’s segregation and discrimination was muted and sarcastic. At the YWCA, “a woman there said to me ‘Why don’t you go someplace else to eat?’ It was too amusing to get angry” (22 January). She also encountered trouble at a local movie theater: “We will not again go to the Colonial since the insolence of the ushers has become unbearable” (5 June). Attending a performance by the singer and activist Emma Azalia Hackley, she noted “I think she is an egoist but she says forceful things for the c. people.” (28 March). Her reaction to the NAACP and its local leader Samuel De Bow was skeptical: “I went to the meeting of the N.A.A.C.P. tonight. It was some meeting for advancement, oh my. Mr. De Bow is a nice man, and I like him, but he seems not to possess that happy faculty of sometimes agreeing with people” (7 June). Sanders was a singer and pianist, often performing at church events and at least once giving a piano lesson. In addition to music, sports were a favorite activity: “Mary & I went to the ball game. The colored boys got beaten” (16 May). She was an avid tennis player, but had difficulty finding a court to play on: “We were informed last night that the white people concluded that for the colored folks to have a tennis court at 23 & E would make it too shady, so that will have to be abandoned” (2 June). In 1919, Sanders would marry George W. “Kay” King (1885-1950); their son Winfield later went on to become a prominent Seattle pianist and bandleader. Her oral history can be found in Esther Hall Mumford’s “Seven Stars and Orion: Reflections of the Past,” a history of African-American women in Seattle. Additional quotations from this insightful and entertaining diary are available upon request; accompanied by copy prints of two unpublished photographs of Sanders and other research notes.