From the back cover:

12 Million Black Voices, first published I 1941, combines Wright's prose with starling photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam from the Farm Security Administration files compiled during the Great Depression. The photographs include works by such giants as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein. From crowded, run-down farm shacks to Harlem storefront churches, the photos depict the lives of black people in America--their misery and wariness under rural poverty, their spiritual strength, and their lives in northern ghettos. Wright's accompanying text eloquently narrates the story of these pictures and delivers a powerful commentary on the origins and history of black oppression in this country.