Search Results: Racism from Downtown Brown Books, ABAA

McLean, VA: Human Sciences Research, 1972. First Edition. Trade paperback. Very good. A guide to help officers combat racial discrimination in the army in the waning years of the Viet Nam war. The authors report that the army had few Black officers, that Black soldiers had a hard time obtaining technical positions, and that Black soldiers were twice as likely as white soldiers to face discipline. The handbook devotes most of its efforts to trying to convince white officers that they and other white soldiers might be the problem. The final chapter (Appendix A) traces the history of segregation and integration in the Army. vi, 87 pages. 8 by 10-1/2 inches. Prepared for the Department of the Army, Motivation and Training Laboratory, U.S. Army Manpower Resources Research and Development Center, under contract DAHC 19-17-C-0020. With an org chart for the US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences laid in. A very good or better copy in black printed wrappers. Org chart fine.

(St. Augustine, Florida?): The Florida Club, 1880. Ephemera. Near fine. A stereoview card that can be read at many levels: as a glimpse of post-Reconstruction African American life in Florida, as a White supremacist image, as a statement of class superiority, and as an early image of the Lost Cause. These photographs offer a portrait of a young Black boy at work, probably for a poor white farmer. The boy sits in an oxcart in the St. Augustine Plaza de la Constitucion. Presumably the driver of the cart has stepped away, leaving the child in charge. That the child is working is suggested by the caption pasted on the verso (back), which refers to the boy and the ox as "the team of a Florida cracker," which is "a nickname applied to the poor white people of [The South]" (Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, 1877). The intent of this stereoview is clearly to denigrate the boy for being black and the oxcart's owner for being poor, but it also shows significant responsibility entrusted to a child as… Read More