"To be a slave. To be owned by another person, as a car, house, or table is owned. To live as a piece of property that could be sold, a child sold from its mother, a wife from her husband. To be considered not human, but a 'thing' the plowed the fields, cut the wood, cooked the food, nursed another's children, a 'thing' whose sole function was determined by the one who owned you."

This book is about how it felt.

All the aspects of slavery in America are described in vivid and often painful detail by black men and women who had themselves been slaves. Many were illiterate. "They had no formal education; but they had the education of day-to-day living, of observing people and nature, for sometimes their lives depended on such knowledge."

The major portion of the text has been constructed from the memories of ex-slaves—written down both before and after the Civil War. These are set as quotations within Julius Lester's clear and forceful commentary on the history of black Americans from the time of their abduction from Africa, through their experiences on board ship, the auction block, their labour on the plantations their futile attempts at resistance. The book culminates with the Civil War and Emancipation—but the victorious North failed to ensure equality between black and white, and the Ku Klux Klan and segregation inevitably followed. The emotions of the people who lived through these events are timeless.

From the dust jacket of the 1970 Longman Young Books (UK) edition