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8 pp. Illustrated with photographs of Los Angeles sponsors and organizers of the event (including several prominent civil rights lawyers) as well as award recipients Jesse Graves, Lena Horne, Rex Ingram, Dooley Wilson, and white actress Bette Davis (honored for her contribution to inter-racial harmony). 13x10" original pale green wrappers, printed in black.

Signed by Dooley Wilson, best-remembered as Sam, the piano player in the classic film, “Casablanca”, on front cover, and by actors Mantan Moreland (who played detective Charlie Chan in several films), and “Nicodemus” Stewart (Cotton Club Vaudevillian who later starred in the Amos n’ Andy TV series). Also signed by Jesse Graves by his photograph within the program. This World War II forerunner (by 24 years) of the later NAACP Image Awards –  a sort of Black parallel to the Oscars – might have signaled a new age of Black progress in Hollywood, had it not been for the unfortunate choice of Hattie McDaniel as the keynote speaker. A racially-integrated crowd of 3000 who gathered in the auditorium of a Black Baptist church, including Hollywood stars, writers, producers and studio executives, listened to McDaniel, the first African-American to be honored with an Oscar (for her role as “Mammy” in “Gone With The Wind”) read a 30 minute speech, in which she outlined the progress of Black entertainers in the industry, defended Black actors and actresses – such as herself – who had accepted menial roles that portrayed domestic servants, and paid tribute to Black soldiers who were then fighting abroad in the World War. All went well until the 49 year-old McDaniel, praised Lena Horne, the beautiful 27 year-old actress and singer who had won substantial roles in several musicals, as “a representative of the new type of Nigger Womanhood”. The derogatory word was pronounced so distinctly, that, according to a white Los Angeles journalist who was present, the crowd “sat in stunned silence”, while McDaniel backtracked by emphasizing, “I said Negro womanhood.” The reporter, who claimed Horne herself was so embarrassed that she began to “sweat”, wrote a front-page story about the unfortunate “Slip of the Lip”, which was picked up by a Baltimore Black newspaper with national readership under the headline, “Miss McDaniel Accused of Using Offensive Epithet”.  This so enraged McDaniel that she lashed out at the “prejudiced” white journalist in a long vitriolic letter to a Los Angeles Black paper, saying the audience had responded with laughter rather than shock to her “regrettable error”, which had been “falsely exaggerated” to sow “seeds of discord and malicious antagonism.” As a result, McDaniel’s career (and her standing in the Black community) suffered – and the first “annual” award ceremony was also the last, not reprised by the NAACP until 1968. As many of those in attendance probably preferred to forget what might otherwise have been an historic event, this ephemeral “souvenir” is very rare, and especially desirable with the Wilson and other signatures.