Free At Last.
"Bidding farewell to this safe resting place, where there was nothing to hurt men, he exclaimed in an ecstacy of delight, Free at Last!": Rare First edition of Mrs. Jane S. Collins' Free at Last
Free At Last.
COLLINS., Mrs. Jane S.
$4,800.00
Item Number: 142376
Pittsburgh: Press of Murdoch, Kerr & Co., Incorporated, 1896.
First edition of this semi-historical civil rights narrative by Jane S. Collins, whose husband ran the first racially-integrated school in Indiana during the Civil War. Octavo, original cloth with gilt titles to the spine, illustrated with frontispiece and 15 plates. In very good condition. Ownership inscription. Rare.
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.
