W.E.B. Du Bois: “The country is rich, yet the people are poor.”

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.

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.

Would America have been America without her Negro people?

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