Half a Man: The status of the Negro in New York

First published in 1911, this shocking anthropological account of life for free blacks in turn-of-the-century New York covered a period that subsequent scholars referred to as "the nadir of American race relations" and raised the question of whether conditions for the free black living in the tenements were actually worse than the degradation and cruelties of slavery. Ovington went on the cofound the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.