The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson

Publisher: Sherman, French, & Co. - New York

Date: 1912

This is a beautiful book and one I should have read a long time ago. There are some amazing passages in here dealing with race, but the most touching passage to me was near the start of the book where the boy sits on the couch with his mother:

“Always on such evenings, when the music was over, my mother would sit with me in her arms often for a very long time.  She would hold me close, softly crooning some old melody without words, all the while gently stroking her face against my head; many and many a night I thus fell asleep.  I can see her now, her great dark eyes looking into the fire, to where?  No one knew but she.  The memory of that picture has more than once kept me from straying too far from the place of purity and safety in which her arms held me.”

A must read.