Ebook: America behind the color line: dialogues with African Americans

"Henry Louis Gates, Jr., examines the surprising social and economic journey African Americans have made. Using the interviews he conducted for his PBS series, Professor Gates portrays a community united by shared memory and a strong, vibrant culture, yet divided by wealth and lack of opportunity - a people still struggling to ensure true equality for all." "Professor Gates traveled across the country interviewing forty-four famous and not-so-famous individuals from parts of the African-American community - the "Black Elite," "The New South," "Chicago's South Side," and "Black Hollywood." In their own words, each discusses what it means to be African American in the twenty-first century: from Maya Angelou and Morgan Freeman's reflections on "returning home" to the South ... to convict "Eric Edwards" telling us how his peers find self-sufficiency and prove their adulthood ... from an interracial couple describing how they cope with the remnants of racism in Birmingham to a single mother's insights into how life on Chicago's newly renovated South Side still presents its own particular obstacles and dangers."--Jacket.