SOURCE: Wells, H. G. “H. G. Wells.” In Broken Image: Foreign Critiques of America, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn, pp. 189-201. New York: Random House, 1972.

In the following excerpt, originally published in 1906, English author H. G. Wells reflects on the lives of black Americans living in America during the early twentieth century.

Three unfortunate Negroes were burned to death, apparently because they were Negroes. It was a sort of racial sacrament. The edified Sunday-school children hurried from their gospel-teaching to search for souvenirs among the ashes, and competed with great spirit for a fragment of charred skull.

—H. G. Wells, The Future in America: A Search After Realities (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1906), pp. 185-202

Before he came to America in 1906, the English writer Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) had an international reputation for such brilliant science-fiction novels as The Time Machine and the War of the Worlds. In...