Item #06978 A Message to All Americans - To Black and White and To All Students, Young and Old. MEYER.

A Message to All Americans - To Black and White and To All Students, Young and Old

Brooklyn: Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, 1970. First edition. Stapled wrappers (5 ½” x 8 ½”), 24 pp, illustrated. Some heavy offsetting to front wrapper, else Fine. No record for this title in OCLC.

An eccentric publication organized into 86 numbered paragraphs that outline the purpose of the Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine Mission (“...to abolish unemployment, to create jobs, to reduce the cost of living by establishing ‘Self-Employed Community Projects’ on a non-profit basis”) and the author’s adverse experiences that led him to establish the Mission.

The author, identified only as “Meyer, missionary for T.J. & T.P. Mission,” was a Polish-born Jew who immigrated to the U.S. in 1922. After becoming a successful chicken farmer, he lost his only son during WWII and sank into a depression. After remarrying and siring two more children he became a landlord in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood until he was violently robbed in 1967 by one of his tenant’s friends. He then attempted to establish the first Self-Employed Community Project and claimed to have met with SNCC’s Ralph Featherstone who wanted to rename the venture after Malcolm X. Meyer demurred due to his insistence that the project be multi-racial and he eventually sold his buildings the following year. Incidentally, Featherstone was killed transporting explosives the year this pamphlet was published. A heartfelt and personal publication by an older Jewish immigrant inspired by the U.S.’s founding documents and the social changes taking place in the late 1960’s. Item #06978

Price: $75.00

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