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".