PBA Galleries

472 pp. Extensively illustrated. Original cloth. Probable First Edition.

Something of a renaissance man, Daniel Wallace Culp was the first graduate in 1876 of Biddle University in North Carolina, going on to graduate with honors from Princeton Theological Seminary. After serving as a Minister at churches in Alabama and Tennessee, he studied Medicine, received his M.D. from an Ohio medical college and became superintendent of a Freedman’s Hospital in Georgia – a post, coveted by white physicians, from which he was soon “ejected”. He then moved to Florida, where he built up a successful private medical practice, briefly putting that aside to direct an elite Black high school, where James Weldon Johnson recalled him as a “well-educated man” but a “poor teacher” and administrator. This itinerant career, and his declining health, set the stage for Culp’s greatest achievement – compiling this massive anthology, with contributions by Booker T. Washington, Mrs. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Mary Church Terrell, Kelly Miller, and scores of now-forgotten African-American luminaries at the turn of the century. Culp’s tour de force is still widely cited by historians, a century later, for its unrivalled biographic information and its far-sighted consideration of such subjects as the achievement of Black inventors, the critical social role of Black women and whether Black colleges should be administered by Black educators rather than white philanthropists.