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To the reading public:

I have not undertaken to present between these covers something that will cause the venom of prejudice to grow more poisonous; to arouse greater antagonisms; but to lay before a fair-minded, love-governed world the only real solution of any problem of the many mankind face. Having lived and battled in a world of prejudice, knowing that under the skin I was and am no whit different than any other human being, and knowing the fallacy of race prejudice, also the swiftness with which race prejudice vanishes when we know one another, I have tried to show how all can dwell side by side, good patriotic American citizens, living and allowing to live.

I have reserved to myself the right of every story teller, viz.—to name outright some places to which the story reaches and to merely describe others. Not all the events described have occurred in the places where they have been placed in the story but they are based on actual happenings nevertheless. The thread of my story is human; as human as life itself, just as Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Desdemona, Ruth and Boaz and Jacob and Rachael are human.