Foreword by W.E.B. DuBois

Those who know what it means to be a colored woman in 1922 — and know it not so much in fact as in feeling, apprehension, unrest and delicate yet stern thought — must read Georgia Douglas Johnson’s Bronze. Much of it will not touch this reader and that, and some of it will mystify and puzzle them as a sort of reiteration and over-emphasis. But none can fail to be caught here and there by a word — a phrase — a period that tells a life history or even paints the history of a generation. Can you not see that marching of the mantled with

   "Voices strange to ecstasy?" 

Have you ever looked on the “twilight faces” of their throngs, or seen the black mother with her son when

   "Her heart is sandaling his feet?" 

Or can you not conceive that infinite sorrow of a dark child wandering the world:

   "Seeking the breast of an unknown face!" 

I hope Mrs. Johnson will have wide reading. Her word is simple, sometimes trite, but it is singularly sincere and true, and as a revelation of the soul struggle of the women of a race it is invaluable.

W. E. B. Du BOIS. New York, August 4, 1922.