In his sophisticated, savvy, charismatic, fifty-year career, Mayor Coleman Young has been called many things, and one of them is the most powerful black politician in American history. His account of his epic journey from "Big Time Red" on the Prohibition streets of Detroit to five terms as the city's mayor looks back on decades of activity paralleling every modern African-American movement.

Young's family moved from Alabama to Detroit's Black Bottom in the early twenties. He was an officer in a barely integrated army, a member of the Tuskegee Airmen who called for Eleanor Roosevelt's support when he and fellow black officers were suffering under army Jim Crow laws. He was a labor activist intimately involved in the alliance of white and black workers in the union movement of the thirties and forties. And he was an urban leader who struggled to bring solvency and self-respect to Motor City.

His life abounds in colorful anecdote and abrasive repartee. When he was harassed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, his response was: "I consider the activities of this Committee as un-American.

1. This radical visionary and his metropolis are a metaphor for our society. His family history is the territory of Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land. His eloquence and political passion recall The Autobiography of Malcolm X. His blueprint for the future of urban America is his own, and the problems he has confronted - crime, police harassment, white flight, unemployment - are ours.