To Burghardt and Yolande the Lost and the Found...

Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here at the dawning of the twentieth century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle ...

Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round...

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line⁠—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase ...

Easily the most striking thing in the history of the American Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T. Washington. It began at the time when war memories and ideals were rapidly passing; a ...

Once upon a time I taught school in the hills of Tennessee, where the broad dark vale of the Mississippi begins to roll and crumple to greet the Alleghanies. I was a Fisk student then, and all Fisk me...

South of the North, yet north of the South, lies the City of a Hundred Hills, peering out from the shadows of the past into the promise of the future. I have seen her in the morning, when the first fl...

From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, many thoughts ago the slave-ship first saw the square tower of Jamestown, have flowed down to our day three streams of thinking: one swollen from the la...

Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men ...

Have you ever seen a cotton-field white with harvest⁠—its golden fleece hovering above the black earth like a silvery cloud edged with dark green, its bold white signals waving like the foam of billow...

The world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of men is to have new exemplification during the new century. Indeed, the characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization wit...

It was out in the country, far from home, far from my foster home, on a dark Sunday night. The road wandered from our rambling log-house up the stony bed of a creek, past wheat and corn, until we coul...

“Unto you a child is born,” sang the bit of yellow paper that fluttered into my room one brown October morning. Then the fear of fatherhood mingled wildly with the joy of creation; I wondered how it l...

This is the story of a human heart⁠—the tale of a black boy who many long years ago began to struggle with life that he might know the world and know himself. Three temptations he met on those dark du...

Carlisle Street runs westward from the centre of Johnstown, across a great black bridge, down a hill and up again, by little shops and meat-markets, past single-storied homes, until suddenly it stops ...

They that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days⁠—Sorrow Songs⁠—for they were weary at heart. And so before each thought that I have written in this book I have set a phrase, a haunting echo ...

Hear my cry, O God the Reader; vouchsafe that this my book fall not stillborn into the world wilderness. Let there spring, Gentle One, from out its leaves vigor of thought and thoughtful deed to reap ...