About The Book
"Nineteen fifty-four, when I was eighteen years old, is held to be a crucial turning point in the history of the Afro-American -- for the USA as a whole...
Read more
-- 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)
Hide more