for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf

True first: Shameless Hussy Press, San Lorenzo, California, 1975 — a small feminist-press chapbook in wrappers, which precedes the trade publication by two years. The census note is correct that the familiar Macmillan hardcover is a LATER edition routinely missold as the first, but the Macmillan is dated 1977 (New York, 64 pp., quarter blue cloth over yellow and orange paper boards, gilt spine lettering, jacket designed by Rubin Pfeffer, price present at the front flap). The Macmillan text is expanded: it adds a preface, absent from the Shameless Hussy chapbook, in which Shange recounts the opening at Minnie's Can-Do Club in Haight-Ashbury and the move to Broadway. There is no competing UK or original-language edition; the precedence question here is purely small-press-vs-trade, and the 1977 Macmillan is a genuine "first thus" (first hardcover, first with the preface), never the first edition.