South of Freedom

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952. Unknown edition (identical dates to t.p. & copyright page); possible book club ed. (?). 270 pages; 21 cm. Small closed tear to jacket spine head regions; minor edge-wear also to jacket; else jacket very good(+) thus. Book itself has some light foxing to endpapers; else crisp and near fine thus. In archival mylar. . Hardcover.

"In 1951, Carl Rowan, a young African American journalist from Minneapolis, journeyed six thousand miles through the South to report on the reality of everyday life for blacks in the region. He sought out the hot spots of racial tension―including Columbia, Tennessee, the scene of a 1946 race riot, and Birmingham, Alabama, which he found to be a brutally racist city―and returned to the setting of his more personal trials: McMinnville, Tennessee, his boyhood home. In this “balance sheet of American race relations,” Rowan plots the racial mood of the South and describes simply but vividly the discrimination he encountered daily at hotels, restaurants, and railroad stations, on trains and on buses. ... South of Freedom is a first-rate account of what it was like to live as a second-class citizen, to experience the segregation, humiliation, danger, stereotypes, economic exploitation, and taboos that were all part of life for African Americans in the 1940s and 1950s"--Publisher