W.E.B. Du Bois: “They deny my right to live and be and call me misbirth!”

Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not still-born into the world wilderness.

Our song, our toil, our cheer, and warning have been given to this nation in blood-brotherhood.

Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to…

The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving.