Reminiscences of an Active Life: The Autobiography of John Roy Lynch. (Signed by John Hope Franklin) by John Roy Lynch

Chicago and London: University of Chicago, (1970). 521 pages. Hardcover with light spotting to edges of text block and dustwrapper; a very good copy.

First edition. Inscribed by John Hope Franklin, the series editor and dean of African American historians. Published for the first time, the autobiography of John Roy Lynch who was enslaved from birth on a Louisiana plantation. Lynch rose to become Speaker of the House for the Mississippi legislature and later became the first African American elected to the United States Congress from Mississippi. Among his accomplishments were the securing of the Civil Rights Bill of 1875 and the first Black American to deliver the keynote address at a Republican National Convention, the latter event would not happen again until 1968.