W.E.B. Du Bois: “From birth till death enslaved; in word, in deed, unmanned! ****** Hereditary bondsmen!”

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

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.

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…

If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free.