It's a history of the USA Black Power movement up until the near-present day. I'd already read plenty about the 1960s, but this book (though it writes about Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and their life and times) had a chapter full of stuff I knew little about: how these ideas echoed on up through to the election of Barack Obama. I read about the Kerner Commission: LBJ put together this commission to report on how all these race riots were black folks' fault; instead, they found that black folks had plenty to be angry about. LBJ got angry at the report and suppressed it. I read about Jesse Jackson's run for the presidency; I hadn't taken it seriously at the time, but it inspired some folks by making it so far.