My favorite Paris guidebook is not from Lonely Planet, Wallpaper or Monocle. In fact, I’m sure you have never heard of it. Titled “Paris Here I Come!” and published by the Afro-American Company in 1953, it is a slim volume, a mere 30 pages set inside a cheerful yellow cover emblazoned with a white line drawing of the Eiffel Tower.
Full of charming, conversational advice, the booklet describes Paris as “not a place, but a way of living — unique, lusty and uninhibited.”
The author’s great-uncle, a correspondent for The Afro-American, a Black newspaper based in Baltimore, wrote his guide to Paris in 1953.
The book’s author, Ollie Stewart, was my father’s uncle, born in Louisiana in 1906. He was the first Black reporter accredited as a war correspondent during World War II, and after the war, he lived in Paris until his death in 1977.
Ollie Stewart in 1943, when he was covering the Second World War for the Afro-American newspaper, interviewing Lt. Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., of the Tuskegee Airmen.Credit…Us Army/PhotoQuest, via Getty Images
In the e-book “Race Goes to War,” Antero Pietila and Stacy Spaulding describe Uncle Ollie’s wartime travels for The Afro-American, a Black newspaper based in Baltimore. He covered skirmishes in North Africa in 1942, the battle for Sicily in 1943 and the invasion of Normandy in 1944.