Free At Last.

COLLINS, Mrs. Jane S.

$4,000.00

Item Number: 137487

Pittsburgh: Murdoch, Kerr & Co, 1896.

First edition of this historical story of Black civil rights in the Jim Crow era. Octavo, original cloth, with 16 drawings and portraits, including Frederick Douglass and Abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Rare with only one example appearing at auction in the last 90 years.

A semi-historical narrative of civil rights, the hero of Free at Last is the well-educated son of formerly enslaved parents who demands admission to the White House to meet President Chester Arthur and General Grant. The wife of a Presbyterian clergyman who directed the first racially-integrated school in Indiana during the Civil War, Jane Collins gained notoriety as an anti-liquor crusader in the 1870s. She was arrested twice for leading “sit-ins” in saloons during which she and her white female followers knelt in prayer on bar-room floors – an early form of civil disobedience which foreshadowed the passive resistance of Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement a hundred years later.