From 1994 to 2003, Hugh Price served as president and CEO of the National Urban League. During his tenure, he tripled the League’s endowment, restructured its board of directors and staff; conceived and launched the League’s Campaign for African-American Achievement; established the League’s Institute for Opportunity and Equality, and established its headquarters on Wall Street. Price’s role at the League was just one aspect of his long and impressive life.
In This African-American Life, Price traces his family’s forbearers, which include several interesting and historically significant ancestors like Nero Hawley, who fought in the American Revolution and served at Valley Forge under Washington and George Latimer and his wife who escaped from slavery in Virginia stowing away on a boat and traveling to the North as a master and salve. When George was spotted by someone from his past, the effort to return him to his master became one of the earliest fugitive slave cases attracting the involvement of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.
Price talks about his protected childhood in the segregated neighborhood near Howard University, his love of baseball, his experiences as one of five brothers in his freshman class at Amherst, where he also played baseball and basketball, his courtship of his wife, and then goes on to detail the varied positions he held during his professional career. Throughout his memoir, Price shows how his background led him to champion education and the creation of opportunity to help others reach the high levels he has been able to achieve during his lifetime.
