Remarks by Charles Frederick White

“Ask yourself whether he is not partly right, whether you yourself could love a country and a people who had treated you as herein stated.”

Inviting readers to judge his protest by imaginatively placing themselves within his experience · Foreword to Plea of the Negro Soldier and a Hundred Other Poems, 1908

“He lives in harmony with everyone who will be congenial to him”

Presenting fellowship rather than racial division as his personal ideal · Foreword to Plea of the Negro Soldier and a Hundred Other Poems, 1908

“He thinks as much of one person as of any other, so long as he is treated well and justly”

Expressing a straightforward ethic of reciprocal respect and fair treatment · Foreword to Plea of the Negro Soldier and a Hundred Other Poems, 1908

“This same person has absolutely no prejudice towards any human being on account of race, color or creed”

Affirming human equality despite the racial prejudice he himself endured · Foreword to Plea of the Negro Soldier and a Hundred Other Poems, 1908

“The author's own experience is here but briefly told and these writings are based upon actual facts”

Insisting that the anger in his writing arose from lived experience rather than abstraction · Foreword to Plea of the Negro Soldier and a Hundred Other Poems, 1908

“You would surely think this a wretched and ungrateful country.”

Condemning the injustice he experienced despite having served his country as a soldier · Foreword to Plea of the Negro Soldier and a Hundred Other Poems, 1908

“You would hardly feel that any folk but black folk were your friends.”

Reflecting on how generations of racial injustice shaped his sense of belonging and trust · Foreword to Plea of the Negro Soldier and a Hundred Other Poems, 1908

“If you had lived upon scant means, compelled to support yourself, often being physically hungry in an endeavor to satisfy your mental hunger for knowledge”

Contrasting physical deprivation with an intense hunger for learning · Foreword to Plea of the Negro Soldier and a Hundred Other Poems, 1908

“If you had been deprived of an education in your early youth; if then you had run away from home to obtain that education”

Recalling his determined pursuit of education despite poverty and disadvantage · Foreword to Plea of the Negro Soldier and a Hundred Other Poems, 1908

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