Introductory Note
More than eighty-five years ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes nobly said: “It is so much easier to consign a soul to perdition or to say prayers to save it, than to take the blame on ourselves for letting it grow up in neglect and run to ruin. The English law began, only in the late eighteenth century, to get hold of the idea that crime is not necessarily a sin. The limitations of human responsibility have never been properly studied.”
If Dr. Holmes were alive now, he would be proud, as I am proud, of the chance to help bring to the thoughtful attention of intelligent, morally responsible Americans, the honest, dreadful, heart-breaking story of a Negro childhood and youth, as set down by that rarely gifted American author, Richard Wright.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Arlington, Vermont