W.E.B. Du Bois: “Orators declaim on the corners, lovers lark in the streets, gamblers glide by the saloons, workers lounge wearily home.”

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

So wofully unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectability, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science.

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.

So long as the world stands meekly dumb before such questions, shall this nation proclaim its ignorance and unhallowed prejudices by denying freedom of opportunity to those who brought the Sorrow Songs to the Seats of the Mighty?