Black Civil Rights. The author describes herself as liberal and born southerner (MD & VA) attending a party at Greenbrier Hotel, West Virginia, in 1967. The speaker at the event, Whitney Young (Executive Director of the National Urban League), asked her to dance and so her husband asked Young's wife to dance. Whitney Young struck her like boys she knew growing up: gentle, mannerly and outgoing. They have a long conversation, sharing stories of their lives and history pertinent to civil rights. Young described the division in the black community: the builders vs the burners. The author covers topics: Booker T Washington, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King, Stokey Carmichael, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X (whom she listened to at an outdoor gathering in Harlem). Her thesis (and hope for the future) is that blacks and whites who grow up as children familiar and comfortable with each other, do not become extremist and separatist, that is the "burners".