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This grossly racist novel represents white southern attitudes towards black people in the early 1900s. It contains some disturbing subject matter such as the attempted gang rape of a white girl by black men and subsequent death of the girl at the hands of her would-be rescuers, and should be approached with care.
From Wikipedia:
The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden—1865–1900 is the first novel of Thomas Dixon's Reconstruction trilogy, and was followed by The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907). In the novel, published in 1902, Dixon offers an account of Reconstruction in which he portrays a Reconstruction leader (and former slave driver), Northern carpetbaggers, and emancipated slaves as the villains; Ku Klux Klan members are anti-heroes. While the playbills and program for The Birth of a Nation claimed The Leopard's Spots as a source in addition to The Clansman, recent scholars do not accept this.
The first half of a passage from the Book of Jeremiah (13:23) is included on the title page: "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?" While the full passage is about evildoers refusing to turn away from evil to good, the title conveys the idea that, as leopards could not change their spots, people of African origin could not change what Dixon, as a racist and white supremacist, viewed as inherently negative character traits.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's landmark novel of 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S. and is said to have "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War". It was still widely read fifty years after its publication. According to Dixon, whose contact with the work was a dramatized version, Stowe "grossly misrepresent[ed]" the American South, and he felt her sympathetic portrayal of African Americans demanded revision. So as to make it clear he is answering Stowe, he presents his version of Stowe's characters, using Stowe's character names.
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