Masters of the dream

Written by a nationally known, respected commentator, Masters of the Dream is an insightful and passionate call for self-empowerment as well as a controversial look at black American experience and power. Insisting on the existence and importance of strong, positive identity, Alan L. Keyes urgently grapples with the moral identity crisis of the nation's cities.

He evaluates the problems of crime, violence, and other self-destructive behavior as a result of a deterioration of the values that contributed to earlier black survival and the success of the civil rights movement and believes that adopting an ideology of victimization is disastrous.

Observing that today's black leadership has particularly ignored the central importance of the black church and religious faith as the basis for self-government and moral discipline, he sees this result: programs that have weakened the fabric of the community, leading to an unprecedented degree of family disintegration, black-on-black violence, and economic despair.

Masters of the Dream offers a startling and urgent new vision for American cities, drawing on solid scholarship and historical precedent.

Proposing a restructuring of urban government that will dramatically restore the opportunity for decent self-determination in "war zone" neighborhoods, it explains how removing the power from political bureaucracy - and giving it back to people at the neighborhood level - can allow citizens to control their lives in a way that has been unheard of since black citizens governed their own towns in nineteenth-century America. To see how this can be done and what it will look like in practice is the powerful vision of Keyes's seminal thinking.

For both race relations and the urban nightmare today, this is a book whose message is hope.