In view of what has been said, it is natural that the method of treatment should vary with the different chapters. Sometimes it is general, as when we touch upon the highways of American history. Sometimes it is intensive, as in the consideration of insurrections and early effort for social progress; and Liberia, as a distinct and much criticized experiment in government by American Negroes, receives very special attention. For the first time also an effort is now made to treat consecutively the life of the Negro people in America for the last fifty years.
This work is the result of studies on which I have been engaged for a number of years and which have already seen some light in _A Short History of the American Negro_ and _The Negro in Literature and Art_; and acquaintance with the elementary facts contained in such books as these is in the present work very largely taken for granted. I feel under a special debt of gratitude to the New York State Colonization Society, which, coöperating with the American Colonization Society and the Board of Trustees of Donations for Education in Liberia, in 1920 gave me opportunity for some study at first hand of educational and social conditions on the West Coast of Africa; and most of all do I remember the courtesy and helpfulness of Dr. E.C. Sage and Dr. J.H. Dillard in this connection. In general I have worked independently of Williams, but any student of the subject must be grateful to that pioneer, as well as to Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, who has made contributions in so many ways. My obligations to such scholarly dissertations as those by Turner and Russell are manifest, while to Mary Stoughton Locke's _Anti-Slavery in America_--a model monograph--I feel indebted more than to any other thesis. Within the last few years, of course, the _Crisis_, the _Journal of Negro History_, and the _Negro Year-Book_ have in their special fields become indispensable, and to Dr. Carter G. Woodson and Professor M.N. Work much credit is due for the faith which has prompted their respective ventures. I take this occasion also to thank Professor W.E. Dodd, of the University of Chicago, who from the time of my entrance upon this field has generously placed at my disposal his unrivaled knowledge of the history of the South; and as always I must be grateful to my father, Rev. E.M. Brawley, for that stimulation and criticism which all my life have been most valuable to me. Finally, the work has been dedicated to the memory of a distinguished soldier, who, in his youth, in the nation's darkest hour, helped to lead a struggling people to freedom and his country to victory. It is now submitted to the consideration of all who are interested in the nation's problems, and indeed in any effort that tries to keep in mind the highest welfare of the country itself.