He was in Poland to participate in the NATO conference, President [Barack] Obama did respond well to the back-to-back killings, as well as to the attacks on Dallas police officers that followed.

I always want to read something about our people's enslavement near the 4th. To keep it light, I also read Rolanda Watts' "Destiny Lingers" She is a sisterfriend and I ran into her at Essence. Then, I finished Paul Taylor's "The Next America." Taylor is the Executive VP at the Pew Research Center, and he uses their excellent data base to talk about the coming "generational showdown" which we are experiencing, at some level, in Black America.

When public policy is directed toward urban spaces, it is directed toward people who sit at the margins.

I like to think that life lessons are learned and re-learned every day and take on importance at different times in life.

[My childhood was ] spiritual than religious.

Always firmly believing in a higher power, I have also always been in search of a spiritual peace.

This is a column collection, or as one colleague called it, "history in real time," recounting my perspective on the highs and lows of this presidency from an African-American perspective. More than simply a column collection, the book has a substantial introduction that frames the [Barack] Obama presidency, explores the way Obama was treated by the political establishment and also how this first black president treated "his" people. In the epilogue, I use numbers to tell the story of African-American gains and losses during this presidency.