Epigraph
There Was Once a Slave, The Heroic Story of Frederick Douglass by Shirley Graham, received the sixty-five hundred dollar JULIAN MESSNER AWARD FOR THE BEST BOOK COMBATING INTOLERANCE IN AMERICA. The judges were: Carl Van Doren, Lewis Gannett, and Clifton Fadiman. Miss Graham’s work was selected from over six hundred manuscripts submitted in the contest. The original award was augmented by a grant from the Lionel Judah Tachna Memorial Foundation, established by Max Tachna in memory of his son who lost his life in the Battle of the Coral Sea.