As I stand there, I find myself thinking that somewhere down the line both guilt and empathy speak to our own buried sense that an order of some sort is required, not the social order that exists, necessarily, but something more fundamental and more demanding; a sense, further, that one…

When I opened the door, I found a big man standing there with his hands in his pockets, an even-toothed grin breaking across his body face. In the pictures I had of Roy, he was slender, dressed in African print, with an Afro, a goatee, a mustache. The man who…

That’s what was new: the arrival of a new equilibrium between hope and fear; the sense, shared by adults and youth alike, that some, if not most, of our boys, were slipping beyond rescue. Even lifelong South Siders like Johnnie noticed the change. “I ain’t never seen it like this…

I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way. It was the sort of change that’s important not because it alters your concert circumstances in some ways but because it hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on, beyond the immediate exhilaration, beyond…

Sometimes, listening to such innocent dreams, I would find myself fighting off the urge to gather up these girls and their babies in my arms, to hold them all tight and never let go. The girls would sense that impulse, I think, and Linda, with her dark, striking beauty, would…

Almost a year had passed since my arrival in Chicago, and our labor had finally begun to bear fruit. Will’s and Mary’s street corner group had grown to fifty strong; they organized neighborhood cleanups, sponsored career days for area youth, won agreements from the alderman to improve sanitation services. Farther…

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader-my father had been all those things, All…

29 Chicago Barack met his younger sister, Auma. She came to meet her brother in Chicago. she was wondering about all his life from the beginning. so Barack told her about Chicago and New York, his work as an organizer, his mother and grandparents, and Maya. Auma called their father…

For the rest of the day and into the next, I thought about Ruby’s eyes. I had handled the moment badly, I told myself, made her feel ashamed for a small vanity in a life that could afford few vanities. I realized that a part of me expected her and…