This African-American Life: A Memoir

“People who believe a problem can be solved tend to get busy solving it,” William Raspberry wrote in the Washington Post in July 1994. “Hugh B. Price is a believer.”
During his tenure as president and CEO of the National Urban League, Price launched its Campaign for African-American Achievement, pressured the federal government to combat police brutality and racial profiling, defended affirmative action, and helped repair frayed relations between the black and Jewish communities. Yet his role with the League was just one among many accomplishments. Price traces his forbears, among them Nero Hawley, who fought at Valley Forge under George Washington; George and Rebecca Latimer, who escaped slavery by stowing away on a boat and traveling north as master and slave; and Lewis Latimer, who worked with Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Price writes about his childhood in a neighborhood near Howard University in Washington, and his student days in a newly integrated high school and then at Amherst and Yale Law School. He covers his varied and highly successful careers, from his early days as a legal services lawyer to his executive position at the Rockefeller Foundation.
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