Race Adjustment

Celebrating a decade of Columbia Global Reports, the Forerunners series revives groundbreaking works of investigative journalism and incisive analysis published a century before CGRs founding. These texts, once forgotten or underexplored, reflect CGRs core mission: fearless reporting, global perspective, and intellectual rigor. Each selection remains strikingly relevant today, offering historical insights that challenge contemporary perspectives and reaffirm the power of journalism to shape the world.Before Martin, before Malcolmbefore Du Bois and Garvey sharpened their ideological bladesthere was Kelly Miller. A pioneering mathematician, sociologist, and columnist, Miller was one of the most widely read Black intellectuals of the early twentieth century. Race Adjustment, first published in 1908, stood as his response to the tumult of Jim Crow Americaa fiery, clear-eyed set of essays that refused to choose sides between Booker T. Washingtons cautious pragmatism and W.E.B. Du Boiss elite-driven activism.Collected here with a trenchant new introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway, this volume restores Miller to his rightful place as the intellectual center of gravity in a period of radical transition. His critiques of political cowardice, economic exploitation, and the hypocrisies of American democracy ring out with undiminished power. Written from the middle ground, Millers words carried far and widefrom the pages of the Black press to the corridors of power. This selection reveals a moral voice unafraid to indict injustice wherever it appearedand to ask, over a century later: Has the nation truly adjusted?The complete Forerunners series:Campaigns of Curiosity, by Elizabeth L. Banks; with an introduction by Brooke KroegerCuba in War Time, by Richard Harding Davis; with an introduction by Peter MaasRace Adjustment, by Kelly Miller; with an introduction by Jonathan Scott HollowayDrift and Mastery, by Walter Lippmann; with an introduction by Nicholas Lemann