Following the Color Line / An account of Negro citizenship in the American democracy

AN OLD BLACK “MAMMY” WITH WHITE CHILD
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1904, 1905, BY THE S. S. McCLURE COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1907, 1908, BY THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1908, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
PUBLISHED, OCTOBER, 1908
“I AM OBLIGED TO CONFESS THAT I DO NOT REGARD THE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY AS A MEANS OF PUTTING OFF THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE TWO RACES IN THE SOUTHERN STATES.”
— De Tocqueville, “Democracy in America” (1835)

My purpose in writing this book has been to make a clear statement of the exact present conditions and relationships of the Negro in American life. I am not vain enough to imagine that I have seen all the truth, nor that I have always placed the proper emphasis upon the facts that I here present. Every investigator necessarily has his personal equation or point of view. The best he can do is to set down the truth as he sees it, without bating a jot or adding a tittle, and this I have done.
I have endeavoured to see every problem, not as a Northerner, nor as a Southerner, but as an American. And I have looked at the Negro, not merely as a menial, as he is commonly regarded in the South, nor as a curiosity, as he is often seen in the North, but as a plain human being, animated with his own hopes, depressed by his own fears, meeting his own problems with failure or success.