Hello, I'm Bill Moyers, and I'm holding in my hand what has been called one of the most daring books of the 21st century, bracing, unrelenting.

The title is Democracy in Black, How Race Still Slaves the American soul, and it breathes with prophetic fire.

Its power comes because the author does not begin with pristine principles or with assumptions about our inherent goodness.

Rather, its view of democracy as he writes emerges out of an unflinching encounter with lynching trees, prison cells, foreclosed homes, young men and women gunned down by police, and places where hope, unborn, had died.

Democracy in black is rich in history and bold an opinion, and inconvenient truth leap from every page.

For example, and I'm quoting the book again,

Black people must lose their blackness if America is to be transformed.

But of course, white people get to stay white.

The book opens in Ferguson, Missouri, with the author talking to three dynamic young women,

young black women, newly born to activism.

And it closes in the intimacy of the reader's heart, where each of us wrestles with the question

of whether we can indeed change the habits of racism and create together a new politics based on a

revolution in values. The author is Eddie Glaude Jr., and he's with me now. Eddie Glaude was raised

in the Deep South in Moss Point, Mississippi, and still remembers the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross

at the fairground.

He's now a professor of religion and African American Studies at Princeton University,

where he also chairs the Center for African American Studies.

This is his third book, and he's a member in good standing of the black establishment,

which he rigorously calls to account in democracy in black.

Professor Glaude, welcome.

Well, thank you for having me.

Why did you start this book in Ferguson?

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