Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. by King Jr., Martin Luther - 1958

New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1958. Early printing of Dr. Martin Luther King's first book, author James Baldwin's copy with his signature to the front free endpaper. James Baldwin was an American writer whose work dealt with race relations and sexuality. A native of Harlem, he left the United States for France in 1948 to pursue a writing career. While in Europe he published Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), his first novel, which catapulted him to literary fame. In 1957 he returned to the U.S. to lend his voice to the cause of civil rights. Baldwin dissected the American racial conundrum in fictional works and powerful essays, as well as in speaking engagements. He met Dr. King in 1957 when he was writing about the Civil Rights Movement for Harper's magazine and attended the 1963 March on Washington. Octavo, original half cloth, illustrated. Very good in a very good dust jacket. From the library of James Baldwin. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. An exceptional association, linking two of the greatest African Americans of the twentieth century. Stride Toward Freedom is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s account of the first successful large-scale application of nonviolence resistance in America is comprehensive, revelatory, and intimate. King described his book as "the chronicle of fifty thousand Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.''