Part I. A child of misery -- Prologue: race in America -- The legacy of reconstruction -- Jumpin' Jim Crow: legal segregation -- Racial violence and the plight of the freedmen -- Part II. I'm sometimes up and sometimes down -- The rise of the populist movement -- Southern populism -- Washington versus Du Bois -- Part III. He's gone on high to prepare a place -- The great migration -- A nadir of race relations: "It is like writing history with lightning" -- The rise of a new Black culture -- Southern justice, a depression, and a war -- Epilogue: the postwar American landscape: "White prejudice and Negro standards thus mutually cause each other".
