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.