ABSTRACT
It is too little known outside the United States that the American Negro is an oppressed minority not only as a people denied full status as citizens of a country, nor merely in the sense of a people deprived of their full civil liberties in comparison with the majority of the population. The American Negro is oppressed in the sense of an occupied nation. He is oppressed in the sense that people selected for hard labour or extermination are oppressed. The American Negro has been subject to murder at random for many generations. In the rural South, he has been without the right to legal recourse. The peonage system which evolved since the days of slavery reduced the rural Negro population to a terrorised peasant mass, subject to most forms of brutality and mutilation.
