W.E.B. Du Bois: “They were never vulgar, never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an unconventionality that spent itself in…”

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.

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…