“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

• Dignity
• Justice
• Society

“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

• Compassion
• Experience
• Justice

“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