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The First Book of Negroes — Langston Hughes, 1952 (First Edition)

Description

First edition of Langston Hughes's inaugural title in his five-volume "First Book" series for children (New York: Franklin Watts, 1952) — a picture-book history of the African diaspora with special focus on Phillis Wheatley, Mary McLeod Bethune, Frederick Douglass, and Thurgood Marshall, with Booker T. Washington and Harriet Tubman receiving extended treatment. Illustrated in color throughout by Ursula Koering, written as a series of stories told to a fictional Harlem boy named Terry (Gotham Center; UW-Madison Libraries catalog). Physical description: original green cloth stamped in gilt to spine and front board, 8.25 by 7 inches, 70 pages including endpapers, in the original unclipped ($1.75) color pictorial dust jacket with publisher ads on the verso. This copy is near fine in a very good plus jacket, with a tiny chip and a couple of short closed tears to the rear panel and light shelfwear to extremities.

Significance

This is the first title in Hughes's influential five-volume "First Book" series — followed by First Book of Rhythms (1954), First Book of Jazz (1954), First Book of the West Indies (1956), and First Book of Africa (1964) — and the first entry in Franklin Watts's broader "First Book" series for schools to focus on a race rather than a nationality or geographic region (Wikipedia; wetoowerechildren.blogspot.com). Published two years before Brown v. Board of Education, three years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and twelve years before the Civil Rights Act, it was written explicitly to counter what Hughes called the "segregation and scorn of a surrounding White world," aiming to give Black children "back their own souls" (Hughes, quoted in Bishop, 67). Hughes later cited the book directly in his own testimony before Senator Joseph McCarthy's subcommittee as evidence of his belief in American democracy (wetoowerechildren.blogspot.com).

Key Notes

  • Useful for teaching the history of Black children's literature and the mechanics of Cold War-era self-censorship in mainstream American publishing — this book is an unusually well-documented, page-level artifact of that process, with a scholarly-sourced printing-to-printing timeline (the Baker material present in printing one, gone by printing two) rather than a vague or undated claim. It's also a good teaching case for how Harlem Renaissance writers like Hughes pivoted to children's nonfiction later in their careers, building, book by book, a lasting and teachable canon of Black achievement for young readers.

Sources Referenced

Provenance

The true first printing of this book included a photograph and capsule biography of Josephine Baker on page 45, in the chapter "Well Known American Negro Women," alongside Dr. Ruth Temple and Ethel Waters ( wetoowerechildren.blogspot.com ). Specifically for the second printing , Franklin Watts removed Baker's photo and biography entirely, after a New York columnist threatened to attack the book if she remained in it — on the grounds that Baker was a communist ( Bauman Rare Books ; confirmed as a first-vs-second-printing distinction in the scholarly record via Arnold Rampersad, I Dream a World: The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. II , p. 230, cited in Oxford Academic ). That makes the Baker-inclusive first printing — issued at the height of McCarthyism — the scarce, bibliographically important state of this book, distinct from the second printing onward, which permanently dropped her. The columnist and publication responsible are not named in any source located so far; only "a New York columnist" is documented. Franklin Watts separately required Hughes to sign a statement affirming he was not a communist before publication, and the book deliberately omits W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson for the same political reasons ( wetoowerechildren.blogspot.com ). Before cataloging this copy at top-tier value, confirm the Baker photo/biography is present at page 45 — that single page is what separates a $1,500 second-printing-or-later first edition from a $5,000+ grail-tier true first printing.

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