The observations of foreigners have furnished one of the strongest traditions in the study of American life. Alton Hornsby's 'In the Cage" is a book in this great tradition. Hornsby's eyewitnesses of the Southern black man include novelists, educators, journalists, lawyers, historians, physicians, and theologians. Chronologically, the accounts offered in this book stretch from the end of Reconstruction to the eve of the New Deal. By turns horrifying, delightful, instructive, fascinating, and saddening, this is a book that offers a genuinely rounded picture of the complexity of life for the Southern Negro.