In the twenty-nine years since the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which marked the end of the Civil Rights Movement and the ascendancy of conservatism as the dominant force in national politics, many scholars and intellectuals have struggled mightily to explain "what has happened" to Black people. As the millennium approaches, academia, and we as a society, have been confronted with the issue of racism and have sought to re-examine those public policies which have directly impacted the quality of the Black American experience.

What works and what doesn't work in this context largely depends on whose ideology or social/political perspective is applied. The conservatives feel that affirmative action, welfare and "big government" don't work. But the liberals argue that welfare prevents children from starving, affirmative action provides opportunity and the government is just as large as is necessary to finance all the claims for federal services and subsidies. Even among the Black intelligentsia, there are ideological schisms and conflict in the establishment of a national agenda for African Americans.

In his new book, Beyond Black and White: Transforming African American Politics, Dr. Manning Marable provides only a glimpse into the struggle for "the souls of black folk." Marable, in the first sentence of the preface, cautions the reader that the book is only a collection of political and social essays written between 1991-95. This may account for two major flaws in the book: one, that some of the political analysis is overcome by events; and two, the serious lack of any thematic cohesion in the overall work.

The book is divided into three broad categories: Politics of Race and Class; African American Leadership; and Beyond Black and White, a term which the author never fully explains. As the reader moves from one essay to another, one gets the sense of a lack of a compelling or unifying theme that would tie the various chapters together into a single vision of the Black experience. What the book does provide is more like a snap shot of various aspects of race, history and politics, along with some intellectual musings on Black leadership in the Post-Civil Rights era.