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The Negro and the nation

Chapter 2: PREFACE
By Hubert H. Harrison
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About This Book

A collection of radical essays that analyze the condition of Black Americans by examining political, economic, educational, and social injustices. The pieces document systematic disenfranchisement through violence, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and white primaries, alongside economic exploitation, restricted schooling, and daily social discrimination. The writer connects these facts to the shaping of Black political consciousness, advocates a race-first stance and organized self-determination, and criticizes mainstream political institutions for tolerating inequality. Combining reportage and political analysis, the essays call for collective advocacy to secure full civic rights and social equality.

PREFACE

This little book is made up of articles contributed several years ago to radical newspapers and magazines like The Call, The Truth-Seeker, Zukunft, and The International Socialist Review. They are re-published in this form, partly to preserve a portion of the author’s early work, but mainly because they help to throw into strong relief the present situation of the Negro in present day America, and to show how that situation re-acts upon the mind of the Negro. That is the great need of the Negro at this time.

Some time in the near future I hope to write a little book on the New Negro which will set forth the aims and ideals of the new Manhood Movement among American Negroes rich has grown out of the international crusade “for democracy—for the right of those who submit to authority to have A VOICE in their own government”— as President Wilson so sincerely puts it.

Because I wish this little book to have as large a circulation as possible among Negroes and white people, I have preferred publication at a popular price to the doubtful advantage of having a prominent publisher’s name at the foot of the title-page. The present edition consists of five thousand copies. When it is sold off a second edition will be issued.

HUBERT H. HARRISON New York, August, 1917.