A most endearing letter to Tom Simmons, author of The Man Called Brown Condor (Sky Horse Publishing, 2013 www.skyhorsepublishing.com ) from Charles Rosenberg

Dear Mr. Simmons,

I happened to see your book on Colonel John Robinson at the Milwaukee Public Library, and I grabbed it immediately. Thank you so much for writing it. It’s an exciting read, but it also happened to fill in some gaps in my own research on Percival L. Prattis, editor at the Pittsburgh Courier and long-time associate of Claude Barnett at Associated Negro Press.

Their respective papers have a lot of correspondence about Robinson, and I had a general notion of what Robinson did, but of course not a lot of background details are available. Being hustling newsmen, they were all talking about what they were going to do for Johnny, what they had done for him, how boosting him was going to boost their circulation… and then, bingo, Robinson had his own ideas about what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

I didn’t know what his plans were… and you’ve filled that in very well, plus a lot more. You might be interested that Barnett and Robinson stopped off in Pittsburgh on the way from New York to Chicago in May 1936. From Barnett’s correspondence with Prattis, you wouldn’t know they had first been in New York. It’s funny the way any one source gives only a half-picture of what happened.

I know how much work it had to have been to assemble this story piece by piece. I’ve been writing short biographical articles for African American National Biography and of course these are not the big names, those were done long ago. A scrap here, a scrap there, but it is so satisfying to put all the scraps together in one place.

Again, thank you for illuminating one life that very much deserved to be covered. Your book is going to be an incredibly useful resource in so many ways — and told in an interesting way, as well as in carefully-researched detail.

Charles Rosenberg 

Milwaukee, WI