Brian Lera on WNYC in our Spring membership drive, trying to reach our goal of 10,000 donors.

Thank you for being one if you can.

And during this drive, we're sampling from the

brilliant layer show Bookshelf. A lot of interesting books have come out this spring, and we've

invited 10 different authors to share their minds and hearts as they've poured them into their

books. Back with us now is Princeton Professor Eddie Glaude Jr. with his new book,

we are the leaders we have been Looking for. Those of you who know

Eddie Gleod's work may know him as a scholar of both religion and African American Studies. He's

officially the James S. McDonald Distinguished University professor at Princeton. Some of you know him

as an MSNBC contributor. Also an author many times over,

including his bestseller from 2020, called Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and its

urgent lessons for our own, for which he was on the show. And I think this book contains

some of what Eddie sees as urgent lessons for our time as well, some of which may surprise you.

Again, it's called, we are the leaders we have been looking for.

Eddie, always good of you to come on. Welcome back to WNYC.

It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Do I understand correctly that you started writing this book, Backland, Barack Obama was president?

Yeah, you know, the book began as a series of lectures at Harvard in 2011. And I was trying to make sense of the Obama years. I was upset, actually, that people were

interpreting Obama's presidency as the fulfillment of the black freedom struggle.

And I was worried about what this meant for the nature of black politics, what it meant for the

nature of the struggle for democracy itself. And so these were the beginnings of a series of

ruminations. Out of these lectures came four books, and so I decided to return to

...