“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

• Education
• Perseverance
• Struggle

“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

• History
• Identity
• Society

“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

• Experience
• Truth
• Writing