An Autobiography. The Story of the Lord's Dealings with Mrs. Amanda Smith. The Colored Evangelist. With an Introduction by Bishop Thoburn, of India..

Chicago: Meyer & Brother, 1893 First edition. Publisher's reddish-purple cloth stamped in gilt with portrait of Amanda Smith. . Octavo. With frontisportrait and twenty-five full-page engravings. Slight edgewear. Dark blue coated endpapers. Some marginal toning, as usual. A very good, clean copy of this important autobiography of a Black preacher and missionary.

Amanda Berry Smith (1837 - 1915) was a missionary, Methodist preacher, evangelist for the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and founding member of the Federation of Colored Women's Clubs. Smith was born into slavery in Maryland and, after her father bought the freedom of their family, she married a Methodist deacon and became a preacher in black churches in New York and New Jersey. Smith spent eight years as a missionary in West Africa and, upon returning to the United States, established the Amanda Smith Industrial Orphan Home, an orphanage and school for Black children in Chicago. The Amanda Smith Industrial Orphan Home, founded in 1899, appears in 'Efforts for Social Betterment Among Negro Americans' (1909), the report of an Atlanta University sociological study directed by W.E.B. Du Bois. Between 1899 and 1909, the orphanage had housed and educated sixty Black children.

In this book's introduction, Smith's colleague Bishop J.M. Thorburn attested to Smith's striking presence and command of an audience: "During the many years that I have lived in Calcutta, I have known many famous strangers to visit the city…but I have never known anyone who could draw and hold so large an audience as Mrs. Smith," (p. vi).