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

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Title: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Author: James Weldon Johnson

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

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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 their relations with
each other and to the whites, been made.

It is very likely that the Negroes of the United States have a fairly
correct idea of what the white people of the country think of
them, for that opinion has for a long time been and is still being
constantly stated; but they are themselves more or less a sphinx to
the whites. It is curiously interesting and even vitally important
to know what are the thoughts of ten millions of them concerning the
people among whom they live. In these pages it is as though a veil had
been drawn aside: the reader is given a view of the inner life of the
Negro in America, is initiated into the "freemasonry," as it were, of
the race.

These pages also reveal the unsuspected fact that prejudice against
the Negro is exerting a pressure which, in New York and other large
cities where the opportunity is open, is actually and constantly
forcing an