Janken opens with his subject's lifelong refusal of the word "black" — a refusal so absolute that Logan would break off a conversation or resign from an organisation over it. He preferred "Negro," took the newer term for the property of racial chauvinists who denied that African Americans had European forebears, and reckoned his own ancestry in exact fractions.

The early chapters put that temperament in its setting: birth in 1897, at what Logan later called the nadir of African-American life, into a Washington with an established Black community and good segregated schools; a mother and grandfather from a county of free Negroes in northern Virginia, whose family stories of white kin and unclaimed inheritances he grew up hearing.

From there the narrative moves to the First World War, to the argument among African Americans over whose war it was, and to the Pan-African organising around Du Bois and Blaise Diagne that Logan would soon join.