"Yet there is a strange paradox in the historian's involvement with both present and past, for his knowledge of the present is clearly a key to his understanding of the past. Today were are learning much from the natural and social sciences about the Negro's potentialities and about the basic irrelevance of race, and we are slowly discovering the roots and meaning of human behavior. All off this is of immense value to the historian when, for instance, he tries to grasp the significance of the Old South's "peculiar institution." I have assumed that the slaves were merely ordinary human beings, that innately Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less. I did not, of course, assume that there have been, or are today, no cultural differences between white and black Americans. Nor do I regard it as flattery to call Negroes white men with black skins. It would serve my purpose as well to call Caucasians black men with white skin. I have simply found no convincing evidence that there are significant differences between the innate emotional traits and intellectual capacities of Negroes and whites. This gives quite a new and different meaning to the bondage of black men; it gives their story a relevance to men of all races which it never seemed to have before."