Ira Aldridge was an African American actor who settled in England in the 1820s and died, touring, in Poland in 1867. Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock had their Ira Aldridge: The Negro Tragedian published in in 1958 – by Rockliff in London and Macmillan in New York. In 1968 Southern Illinois University Press issued it in paperback and hardback. The 350 page book was reissued as a classic by Howard University Press in 1993. A hardback Illinois book from 1968 is available at £15; the Howard in soft covers is available for £18. The 1958 editions are priced at £35-£45.

Herbert Marshall wrote the story which Paul Robeson filmed as Proud Valley in 1940.

The decades of research into Aldridge by Texas-based professor Bernth Lindfors led to a four volume biography, and hardback copies are priced at £27 to £29 each. Well presented, the University of Rochester (NY)/Boydell and Brewer (Suffolk) volumes were published in 2011, 2013 and 2015.

Index to Building Your Library

 

#  1         Neil Parsons, King Khama, Emperor Joe and the Great White Queen. Tswana 1895

#  2         Nancy Cunard

#  3         Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson

#  4         Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

#  5         Brew family of Ghana and London

#  6         Booker T Washington; Chief Alfred Sam

#  7         Wellesley Cole, Kossoh Town Boy and An Innocent in Britain

#  8         Ira Aldridge

#  9         Paul Robeson, Negro, 1927

# 10       The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol 1

# 11       Jomo Kenyatta

# 12       Langston Hughes The Big Sea (1940) and Rampersad’s biography 1986, 1988

# 13       Percy Chen, China Called Me

# 14       Stimela Jingoes (Lesotho) recalled France in 1917; Herbert Julian Black Eagle memoir of a Trinidad aeroplane fanatic trained in 1910s England

# 15       Thomas L. Johnson, Twenty-eight Years a Slave (Bournemouth 1909)

# 16       Donald Hinds, Journey to an Illusion (1966).