ABSTRACT
We are the children of the black sharecroppers, the first-born of the city tenements. We have tramped down a road three hundred years long. We have been shunted to and fro by cataclysmic social changes. We are a folk born of cultural devastation, slavery, physical suffering, unrequited longing, abrupt emancipation, migration, disillusionment, bewilderment, joblessness, and insecurity—all enacted within a short space of historical time.
