Negro Legislators of Texas and Their Descendants. A History of the Negro in Texas Politics from Reconstruction to Disenfranchisement

Dallas: Mathis Publishing Co, 1935. Good plus.. x,134pp., plus five pages of photographic plates. Original crimson cloth with gilt titles on front cover and spine. Original green dust jacket ruled in white with black titles on front cover and spine and a color reproduction of the Texas state flag on the front panel. Modest wear to extremities and dust-soiling to cloth, rear hinge partially separated. Minor surface wear and edge wear to jacket, spine head chipped but not affecting spine text. A notable work of Texas African-American history by the state's trailblazing African-American historian. J. Mason Brewer was the first African-American member of the Texas Folklore Society and the first Black author elected to the Texas Institute of Letters. The present work is his second book of history, in which Brewer details the background of political participation by African American Texans from Reconstruction through the "Disenfranchisement of the Negro in Texas," and tracing the rise and fall of African American voting rights in the process. The individual biographies of the legislators provide invaluable background information on a generation of Black men attempting to participate in the government in Jim Crow Texas. The photographic plates picture several of the legislators, some of their descendants, Rev. R.T. Andrews (identified as the grandson of Richard Allen), and a group portrait of the Ladies Reading Circle of Dallas, Texas (to whom the work is dedicated). The present copy is notable for retaining the original dust jacket, which we had never seen before.