THE AMERICAN NEGRO What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become. A Critical and Practical Discussion by Thomas, William Hannibal ; [Hennen Jennings' copy] - 1901

New York: Macmillan Company. Very Good. 1901. Hardcover. xxvi, (2), 440, (2) pages; Original owner's name on endpaper "H. Jennings", otherwise contents are clean and secure in original cloth binding. OCLC 458288822 William Hannibal Thomas (1843 – 1935) was an African American teacher, journalist, judge, writer and legislator. In 1859, he was the first black student admitted to Otterbein University. He served with distinction in the 5th United States Colored Infantry Regiment during the Civil War of 1861-1865, suffering a gunshot wound that led to the amputation of his right arm. After the war, he attended Western Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. Thomas acquired a license to practice law in South Carolina in 1873. He served as a member of the South Carolina Legislature during the Reconstruction period. During Reconstruction, he was an open advocate for armed Black self-defense against white supremacist violence. In 1878, President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed Thomas U.S. consul to Portuguese Southwest Africa (now Angola). Later he founded his own journal, The Negro. He is now most remembered for this book The American Negro (1901). In this book, he maintained that not skin color but the black population's traits of character and behavior were the cause of prejudice. "The negro," he wrote, was "an intrinsically inferior type of humanity." He declared that the black individual in America was slowly and steadily deteriorating, and was "immersed in poverty, steeped in ignorance, stifled with immorality, inherently lazy, and a born pilferer." His writings were used by white racists to support their own ideas of "white superiority and black inferiority." Several black intellectuals such as Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois and Charles W. Chesnutt, attacked the author and sought to suppress his book. James Hennen Jennings (1854-1920) was a mining engineer, born at Hawesville, KY. After attending private schools in London and Derbyshire, England, Jennings returned to Kentucky and set up a lumber business, but soon wanted to further his engineeering education. He graduated from the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University in 1877 with the degree C.E. Jennings then headed West and worked in gold and quicksilver mines in California for the next ten years. In 1887 he went to Venezuela for another mining job. Finally, his talents as an innovative mining engineer, took him to South Africa. During 1889-1905 he was consulting engineer of H. Eckstein, in Johannesburg, and Wemher Beit, in London. Jennings was chiefly responsible for the development and expansion of their mines, employing the most technologically advanced methods and equipment available in the day. In the rough and tumble of South Africa, he managed to keep out of John Hays Hammond's conspiracy to overthrow Kruger's government and to earn a fortune (the equivalent of about 10 million pounds in 2014) before he returned to America in 1905. .