"This work attempts, within the limits of half a million words, to present the essence of the first three hundred years of the history of the American Negro people. This is done through the words of Negro men, women and children themselves ... A Jim Crow society breeds and needs a Jim Crow historiography. The dominant historiography in the United States either omits the Negro people or presents them as a people without a past, as a people who have been docile, passive, parasitic, imitative. This picture is a lie. The Negro people, the most oppressed of all people in the United States, have been militant, active, creative, productive ... "--Introduction.