4to. Folding map printed in red and blue; numerous photographic illustrations. Original dark brown hessian lettered in red on upper cover, lower cover with a map of the "Black Belt of America" stamped in red, beveled boards (some wear to spine ends and corners, hinges starting, slight toning). Provenance: Noël Sullivan (bookplate). 

FIRST EDITION of this monumental anthology, collecting poetry, fiction, and nonfiction primarily by African American writers, including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Arthur Schomburg, Alain Locke, W. E. B. DuBois, Louis Armstrong, and Andre Breton. The work includes "highly valuable documentation on every aspect of Negro life in America and Africa – on history, culture, sociology, and so on" (Jean Wagner, Black Poets of the United States: From Paul Laurence Dunbar to Langston Hughes, 1973). Also included is Cunard's own account of the Scottsboro Boys case.

Word of the anthology by Nancy Cunard, English activist and heiress to the Cunard Line shipping business, leaked to the press in May 1932, two years before the work was published; Cunard included transcriptions of some of the hate mail she received, expressing regret that "[others] are obscene, so this portion of American culture cannot be made public." A large portion of the original edition of 1,000 copies are said to have been lost in a German bombing raid on London, and copies today are said to be "virtually unobtainable.... However, no comprehensive African American library is complete without it" (Blockson One Hundred and One, 71).

A SUPERB ASSOCIATION COPY, from the collection of Langston Hughes's patron and friend, Noël Sullivan, with his bookplate. Pencil annotations on the front free endpaper mark pages 141 and 188, on which contain essays entitled "A Note on Contempo and Langston Hughes" and "Cuban Jim Crow Sends Langston Hughes to Jail" respectively. With a few marginal pencil rules throughout, presumably in Sullivan's hand.