Heading: (African American, 1909)
Author: Beard, Augustus Field
Title: A Crusade of Brotherhood, History of the American Missionary Association
Place Published: Boston
Publisher:Pilgrim Press
Date Published: 1909
Description: 334 pp. Illustrated. Original cloth binding. First Edition.A scarce essential source for African American history from antebellum slave days through the Civil War and Reconstruction to the dawn of the modern Civil Rights era.Written by a white clergyman, It covers the first 60 years of the American Missionary Association - the first missionary group to aid freedmen during the Civil War. Beginning in 1861 with the first school for ex-slaves at a Union fort in Virginia, it continued with assistance to the thousands of "contrabands", who converged on Union-occupied Port Royal, South Carolina later in the war. Postwar, the Association recruited northern teachers to staff hundreds of Southern schools for children and adults in cooperation with the Reconstruction-era Freedmens Bureau and quietly continued its educational work after Jim Crow segregation took hold, assisting in the survival of the historically Black colleges after the Federal Government turned its back on African American education.
The Association dated from 1846 when a group of disaffected members of the older established Protestant missionary groups were upset by their failure to strongly advocate the abolition of slavery. A new racially-integrated Association in New York was founded. While it diplomatically avoiding the subject, the Association may have been involved in aiding escaped slaves - in violation of federal law.

1� tear to upper front joint; foxing; ownership marks; good.