In 1853, the buyers of a slave were warned, in writing, about their new purchase: "She's a wretch. She needs to be whipped. All they are good for is stealing." Today, the document is part of Mark Booker's collection of what he calls "African Americana."
Nine years ago Booker, 37, of Montclair, turned a personal enthusiasm (he calls it an "addiction") for buying and selling historical African-American memorabilia into a full-time business. The collection includes handwritten court documents from the 1700s and 1800s that were receipts of ownership for purchased slaves. The collection, he estimates, is worth $65,000.
Booker's collectibles were displayed at the Israel Crane House, an 18th-century Federal Revival-style mansion maintained by the Montclair Historical Society, to commemorate Black History Month in 2002. The exhibit was presented in six glass cases in the basement of the Crane mansion.
Each display case was devoted to a particular theme or historical figure. Two separate cases were devoted to African-American activists Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington. They contained an assortment of written documents and vintage photographs from the mid-1800s to early 1900s.
An early-1900s stereo view card (a card with two nearly identical images side-by-side inserted into a special viewer to give the image a three-dimensional effect) of Booker T. Washington bears the obviously archaic inscription, "Famous Educator of the Colored."
Booker's most prized items are from his Madam C.J. Walker Collection. C.J. Walker was an African American who transformed herself in the early 1900s from an uneducated farm laborer into one of the wealthiest businesswomen in America. She made her fortune selling a variety of beauty products intended for African-American women.
The Madam Walker collection includes numerous shoe-polish-sized containers of such ointments as Wonderful Hair Grower, a product Walker developed after losing most of her hair from a scalp condition common to poor women at the time, and Tan-Off, a skin brightener.
Since starting his collection nine years ago with the purchase of a Little Black Sambo book, Booker has used the Internet both to buy and sell items.
"I've made a lot of money doing that," he says. A pamphlet written by Frederick Douglass that he bought on eBay for $50 is actually worth $3,200, he estimates. "Sometimes you make money off other people's ignorance."
Despite the fact that he is dealing in African-American collectibles, Booker, who himself is African American, is surprised that most of the people he sells to are white.
Attendance at the Montclair show followed this pattern, he said: "Except for people I specifically invite, all the people that come to this exhibit are white."
He doesn't have an explanation for this—"I'm a collector, not an advertising executive"—but he does hope to do better at promoting his growing collection.
Kevin Grasha studied journalism at Rutgers-Newark in 2002.
