I am writing a memoir that explores the roots of the profound crisis now threatening America's future: the lost moment of Reagan and Bush (41) years of the 1980's and early 1990's. Those were the years when I, as President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Urban League, led its efforts to warn American society that its refusal to provide millions of Americans with the education and job training necessary to prepare them for the twenty-first century would have disastrous social and economic consequences. Now more than ever, those who favor democracy could benefit from a fresh, penetrating assessment of a period too conventionally- and wrongly- described in the popular discourse as one of an alloyed conservative hegemony. Finally, the memoir accounts my own personal journey from childhood and adolescence of deep poverty in the profoundly segregated, mid-twentieth century Houston, Texas, where against the odds, I first got a chance to make it on my own.