Sixty-Seventh Anniversary Celebration and Dedication of J.S. Williams Funeral Home & Burial Assn. [wrapper title]

[Shreveport, La, 1965. Good.. 64pp. Original pictorial light blue wrappers printed in dark blue, stapled. Text printed in blue. Moderate staining and soiling to wrappers and text, minor insect damage to wrappers. An unrecorded program celebrating the anniversary and the dedication of a new building for the African-American-owned J.S. Williams Funeral Home & Burial Association in Louisiana. Williams is described on the front wrapper as "Shreveport's Oldest Negro Business." The celebration took place Sunday, April 11, 1965, and the program includes a schedule of events for the day. The present work contains a history of the business, portraits of the company's embalmers and other staff, memorial messages addressed to some deceased former employees, and more. Most of the work is taken up with advertisements largely from the African-American community in and around Shreveport. The advertisers include other Black churches, local African-American schools like George Washington Carver High School, organizations such as the Supreme Colored Helpers Society of America and the Colored Association of Louisiana, and businesses including Booker T. Washington Nursing Home, Shreveport Mutual Funeral Home, and the Mays Printing Company. The wealth of ads practically add up to a de facto African-American community directory of contemporary Shreveport. We could locate no other copies of this work in OCLC or elsewhere.