The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
by James Weldon Johnson

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

by James Weldon Johnson This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Author: James Weldon Johnson

Release Date: February 9, 2004 [EBook #11012]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN EX-COLORED MAN ***

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Bradley Norton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

THE

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

OF AN

EX-COLORED MAN

James Weldon Johnson

1912

PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION OF 1912

This vivid and startlingly new picture of conditions brought about by the race question in the United States makes no special plea for the Negro, but shows in a dispassionate, though sympathetic, manner conditions as they actually exist between the whites and blacks to-day. Special pleas have already been made for and against the Negro in hundreds of books, but in these books either his virtues or his vices have been exaggerated. This is because writers, in nearly every instance, have treated the colored American as a whole; each has taken some one group of the race to prove his case. Not before has a composite and proportionate presentation of the entire race, embracing all of its various groups and elements, showing

next >