Poster: Dr. Joseph Charles Price, 1854-1893. First President of Livingstone College, Salisbury, N.C., (1882-93)

New York: National Child Welfare Association Inc, 1921. Original illustrated poster, offset printed in black on thick beige stock, measuring 43cm x 71.5cm (17" x 28"). Light wear and handling to extremities, tiny chip to lower left corner, stray ink mark to left edge, with a few tiny nicks and tears, and a longer one (1 9/16") at upper margin; Very Good+. Attractive uplift poster, prominently featuring a large portrait of Dr. Joseph Charles Price rendered in charcoal pencil, beneath the printed quote "I do not care how dark the night; I believe in the coming of the morning." Price (1854-1893), son of a free-born woman and a former slave, was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, raised in New Bern and Wilson, eventually attending Shaw University in Raleigh in 1873. After transferring to Lincoln University in 1875, he was inspired by the oratory of Frederick Douglass and began developing his craft as a speaker, winning oratorical prizes during his freshman and junior years. By 1880 he was ordained as an elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church, representing the denomination as a delegate to the Ecumenical Conference of Methodism in London, where he lectured extensively on the condition of the American Negro and black Methodism; his popularity was such that he was named by the London Times one of the seven greatest orators in the world. He was elected President of the AMEZ-affiliated Livingstone College in Salisbury, NC by their board of trustees in 1882, a position he held until his death in 1893. "That fall the school opened with five students in a two-story building and forty acres of land; by the end of the year it had one new building and ninety-three students. Under Price's leadership, Livingstone College excelled in educating students in liberal arts, theology, scientific training, political science, and social responsibility...Although he was only twenty-eight years old when he became president of Livingstone College, Price rapidly attained regional and national prominence as a leader. His contemporary, W.E.B. Du Bois, remarked, "The star of achievement to which Joseoh Charles Price a black boy of those days hitched his wagon was the founding of a school for colored youth, a sort of black Harvard" (Kinard, Joy G. "Price, Joseph Charles." African American National Biography, Vol.6, pp.434-435). Price died of Bright's disease on October 25, 1893; more than one thousand people - black and white - attended his funeral, the largest Salisbury had ever seen.