One Way. A Practical Solution to the Race Problem in America with an Analysis of the Report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights by [African Americana]. [California]. Ford, D. W - 1947

Oakland: National Association for the Promotion of Civil Rights, 1947. Very good plus.. 120,[1]pp., including photographic portrait frontispiece. Original black textured wrappers, gray titles on front wrapper, stapled. Very minor wear. Internally clean. Without the publisher's reply card mentioned on verso of the final leaf (usually absent). A rare and impactful work created by Daniel W. Ford, a businessman from California, intended to educate "young Americans" on civil rights issues and explicitly published "to help raise funds for the establishment and maintenance of a National Radio Broadcast in the interest of the Civil Rights Program" of the obscure National Association for the Promotion of Civil Rights. Ford was born and raised in "a small Texas town" where he was subject to the vicissitudes of "the system of jimcrow government." At the tender age of twenty-three, just after he moved to California, Ford began examining racial inequality and other civil rights issues. The present work contains a short autobiography and pointed commentary through the lens of the author's Introduction and Preface, but is mostly comprised of excerpts from the report of President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights. In 1948, Truman advanced some of the report's recommendations by issuing executive orders that desegregated the military as well as the federal workforce. Ford contributed the present work as an attempt to distill the Truman committee report to the layperson. The work's impact is ultimately unknown, but its rarity and lack of appearance in notable bibliographies and institutions devoted to the history of African American culture suggests it was obscure and minimally disseminated even in its own time. An important but overlooked contribution to the developing struggle for civil rights in the United States in the mid-20th century, with just three copies in OCLC, at Oakland Public Library, the University of California, Irvine, and the Clements Library.