Brooklyn: Brooklyn Eagle Press, (1920).
Price: $9,500.00
Hardcover. First edition. Small octavo. 256pp. Blue cloth gilt. About near fine with a touch of foxing at the front pastedown, scattered ink marks on the text block and some bumping to the corners in about very good rubbed dust jacket with small tears at the flap folds and moderate chipping to the edges, most notably on the front panel, but still a remarkably sound jacket. An uncommon account by two African-American women of their service with the Y.M.C.A. and their experiences with Black combat units and race relations in France during World War I.
Addie D. Waites Hunton (1875–1943) was a leader in the Young Women’s Christian Association (Y.W.C.A.), serving as secretary for work among Black students. After being educated in Boston and Philadelphia, she taught at a vocational school in Alabama, later the Alabama A.& M. College. During the First World War she was only one of three Black women to serve among the segregated African-American troops.
While in France, “[s]he had witnessed repeated instances of officially sanctioned racial prejudice; Negro recruits had been systematically assigned to menial tasks, barred from fraternizing with the white American troops, discriminated against by most white ‘Y’ workers… An undercurrent of bitterness and indignation thus pervades Two Colored Women...the revealing book Mrs. Hunton co-authored with Kathryn M Johnson. She also notes, however, that the Negroes in the A.E.F. ‘developed in France a racial consciousness and racial strength that could not have been gained in a half century of normal living in America’ (p. 157)”¹
Well illustrated with numerous plates, including many portraits. Interestingly, the table of contents indicates which chapters each woman wrote. The exceptionally scarce dust jacket present here includes cover blurbs by Jessie Fausett, literary editor of the NAACP magazine, *The Crisis*, and by West Indian and “father of Harlem radicalism,” Hubert Harrison, who served as editor of Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, *The Negro World*.
The nicest copy we've seen, and one of only two we've seen in jacket.
Item #591767
