(CIVIL RIGHTS) Equality Dinner Given at the White House by P

Sale 2598 - Lot 190

Price Realized: $ 6,750

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500

(CIVIL RIGHTS.) Equality: Dinner Given at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt to Booker T. Washington. Print, 14 x 18 inches, on white coated stock; mounted on early board, light vertical crease, moderate dampstaining. Chicago: C.H. Thomas & P.H. Lacey / Royal Picture Gallery, 1903

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Booker T. Washington dined at the White House with President Theodore Roosevelt on 17 October 1901. This print was produced to celebrate the historic occasion. This was apparently the only project of the Royal Picture Gallery of Chicago. They took out classified ads in several newspapers across the country, such as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on 24 January 1904, seeking sales agents for "our copyrighted equality picture . . . quick sellers; big profits; can be sold at sight in every colored household."

You might think this print is non-controversial, but then you would be wrong. One of the print's salesmen in Mississippi was the subject of an outraged letter printed in the Jackson Daily News on 11 March 1904: "To the Royal Picture Gallery Company: I say that, if you be the real authors of this work, if we came to your places, hung every one of you as high as Haman and guarded your hanging carcasses until the carrion birds had eaten them, we would still be in debt to you for rougher usage. To Booker Washington, because of this example, the world and the negro would have been better off if you had never been born. It offsets all your other work." The police in Vicksburg, MS were on the hunt to arrest salesmen of this image because it "appealed to race prejudice," according to the Vicksburg Herald of 8 April 1904. The active censorship apparently had a strong effect. Today, none of these widely distributed prints are traced in the international library database OCLC.