-- the year segregation was outlawed by the the US Supreme Court. It was also a rucial year for me beause on June 18, 1954, I began serving a sentence in state prison for possession of marijuana....." Thus begins the book that has become one of the foutainheads of the Black Power movement. Here is a totally frank autobiography of an extraordinary man -- and a devastating dissection of a society in the throes of agonizing reappraisal and momentous change. A spiritual and intellectual autobiography that stands at the exact resonant center of the new Negro writing...a book for which we have to make room - but no on the shelves we have already built. (New Republic)

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