?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
(CIVIL RIGHTS--SEGREGATION.) Description of an Alabama man being "kicked and mauled" by a theater manager for failing to remove his hat. Autograph Letter Signed from Frank A. Brown to his wife of Montague, MA. 2 pages, 9½ x 5¾ inches, on Hotel Printup letterhead; mailing folds, minimal wear. With original stamped envelope. Gadsden, AL, 11 January [1930]
The letter writer Frank Alford Brown (1903-1990) was a white Massachusetts electrical engineer who had apparently gone south to help with a project in an Alabama theater. He accompanied Lee Castleberry, manager of two theaters in town, to visit the local newspaper office:
"We went to see the editor of the local paper this morning and he asked the mgr. (Mr. Castleberry, a very nice man) what he did about 'that nigra.' The mgr said 'I didn't appear against him.' It seems that last Sat eve, the mgr and his wife were at some nearby inn having dinner when a Negro came in and failed to remove his hat. The mgr knocked the coon down and dragged him out into the street and kicked and mauled him pretty bad. Then the police arrested the coon. I asked the manager if the coon tried to defend himself and he said a Negro wouldn't dare to even touch a white man down here. If he did, he'd get lynched."
Mr. Castleberry seems to congratulate himself for not pressing charges against the man he had assaulted. The comment on lynching was not made casually. Gadsden was the site of the particularly notorious lynching of Bunk Richardson in 1906.
