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 CGR’s founding. These texts, once forgotten or underexplored, reflect CGR’s 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 Malcolm—before Du Bois and Garvey sharpened their ideological blades—there 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 America—a fiery, clear-eyed set of essays that refused to choose sides between Booker T. Washington’s cautious pragmatism and W.E.B. Du Bois’s 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,” Miller’s words carried far and wide—from the pages of the Black press to the corridors of power. This selection reveals a moral voice unafraid to indict injustice wherever it appeared—and to ask, over a century later: Has the nation truly adjusted?