One Life Three Professional Careers

In this book an eighty-five years old Texas-born and country-reared African-American reveals "six lessons for life" that he learned as a youth, growing up on his father's farm in racially segregated East Texas, and later while he was a student at Howard University.
Dr. Kirk provides fascinating accounts of how those lessons influenced his approaches to challenging "civil rights" issues and events that impacted the performance of his three professional careers:

-as a professor of political science at Huston-Tillotson University, an institution established historically after the Civil War for the education of Blacks,

-as a program manager at the Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church, and

-as a regional administrator of two federal government "anti-poverty" agencies: the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and the Community Services Administration (CSA)

Dr Kirk vividly "relives" his diverse experiences in applying his "six lessons for life" (a) to desegregation of the graduate school at the University of Texas and in 1958 becoming the first Black to earn a Ph.D. in political science from that institution and (b) to movements against racial segregation in the Austin, Texas community.

In an autobiographical context, the author advances two important unconventional ideas:

. First, his theory of how civil rights strategy may be used to fight racial discrimination in mainline religious denominations (he applied his theory to the United Methodist Church);

. Second, his premises of why the Nixon administration abolished the OEO and the CSA (he served as a regional director of those agencies).

Dr. Kirk's novel views are likely to generate lively academic debate among social historians and public administration analysts.