America Behind the Color Line

"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."--BOOK JACKET.