Heading: (African American, 1910)
Author: Waring, Robert Lewis
Title: As We See It
Place Published: Washington, D. C.
Publisher:Press of C. F. Sudwarth
Date Published: 1910
Description: 233 pp. Portrait frontispiece of the author reading the proofs of this book. Publisher's cloth, lettered in gilt. First Edition.The book is written from the perspective of a college-educated young Black man from Alabama, locked in a violent feud with a wealthy white who murders the man's mother and sister. The Black man takes vigilante revenge by secretly killing three of the five whites implicated in the lynching of his family. Having helped to elect a sympathetic sheriff in his hometown, the young man escapes punishment for his campaign of retribution. Postcard order form for this book laid in.The novel was based on the author's own background and experience. Robert Waring was descended from a Revolutionary War Captain, a Scotsman, who settled in Virginia and produced a family with one of his slaves, a mixed-blood woman whom he later freed, leaving an inheritance to each of his 7 light-skinned quadroon children. One of the Captain's sons married an East Indian woman who gave birth to the author's father, born free in antebellum Fredericksburg, Virginia; Waring senior attended Oberlin College - where much of the book's plot is set - and received a law degree from Howard University, of which he was later a trustee, as well as being ordained a Baptist minister. During the Civil War, the father was chaplain to a Union regiment in Michigan, where the author was born, and then took his family to Washington, DC, where he founded a Baptist church while working as a clerk for the federal government. Robert worked as an officer of the District of Columbia Police force while also studying law at Howard. After receiving his degree, Robert Waring married a lawyer, and together the couple practiced law in Harlem, though often representing their Black clients in Washington courts. All of Robert's relatives were college educated professionals, many in mixed-race marriages, and it's understandable that Robert Waring, living among the Black elite at the turn of the century, should write this book reflecting his sense of superiority over the whites who maintained Jim Crow segregation.

Light rubbing to binding extremities, bottom inch of front hinge cracked, interior clean; near fine.