12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States[1] is a photodocumentary book with text by Richard Wright.

Viking Press approached the author Richard Wright and asked him to write accompanying text to images taken of Blacks living in poverty by the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression.

[1] The book contains four "sections", "Our Strange Birth," "Inheritors of Slavery," "Death on the City Pavements," and "Men in the Making", which are divided into "scenes".

[1] Wright sought to show all of Black society, leaving out the so-called "Talented Tenth", who were "fleeting exceptions to that vast, tragic school that swims below in the depths, against the current, silently and heavily, struggling against the waves of vicissitudes that spell a common fate".

What I wanted to do was make an outline for a series of historical novels telescoping Negro history in terms of the urbanization of a feudal folk.

[10] A reviewer in The Journal of Southern History felt it would not be well received by historians or social scientists because it presented a one sided story.

[6] Nicholas Natanson in 1992 wrote that the book had "received some play in the general-circulation press", some of which was characterized by "echoes" of white guilt.