Letter from a Birmingham suburb. Bus kid ; A place apart ; Oreo ; What can brown do for you? ; Go rebels? -- Planning for Permanence. There goes the Neighborhood ; "Have you seen the country club district?" ; 49/63 or fight ; Turf ; Desirable associations. -- Why do Black people drink Hawaiian Punch? The old boys' network ; Mad black men ; A whole new bag ; The inescapable network ; What's black about it? -- Canaan. The race that prays together ; The strange career of Jesus Christ ; The miracle of the Grand Coteau ; Into the wilderness ; Milk and honey.

This work chronicles America's troubling relationship with race through four interrelated stories: the transformation of a once-racist Birmingham school system; a Kansas City neighborhood's fight against housing discrimination; the curious racial divide of the Madison Avenue ad world; and a Louisiana Catholic parish's forty-year effort to build an integrated church. An exploration of race relations, this book offers a portrait of race in America. In a book that is part reportage, part history, part social commentary, the author explores why the civil rights movement ultimately produced such little true integration in schools, neighborhoods, offices, and churches, the very places where social change needed to unfold. Weaving together the personal, intimate stories of everyday people, black and white, he reveals the strange, sordid history of what was supposed to be the end of Jim Crow, but turned out to be more of the same with no name. He shows us how far we have come in our journey to leave mistrust and anger behind, and how far all of us have left to go.