Uncle Tom's Children

As with ideal theory, answering the question of how the oppressed ought to live is not limited to specifying their moral obligations. It also entails explaining what a life well lived in the face of oppression would involve. Taking for its characters Negro men and women at bay in the oppressive Southern environment, this book represents one of the few instances in which an American Negro writer has successfully delineated the universals embodied in the Negro experience. The result is an imaginative exploration of Southern Negro types, form the simplest sharecropper struggling unconsciously in a world he does not understand, to men and women aware of their fate and approaching it through political conviction.