The White Guy In The Room: A Political Memoir

In November 1963, as he mourned the murder of President John F. Kennedy, Douglas J Patton, a recent college graduate, began to understand his mission in life. Months earlier he had tried to ignore the call to duty. It seemed, however, that he could not avoid the impact of America's turmoil and its racism. While he and his friend Terry Ferry were on a ship to Europe, one of their shipmates, an African-American man, received a telegraph, causing his face to be consumed by shock and dismay. Everyone later learned the contents of that note: Medgar Evers, field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been assassinated in front of his own home in Jackson, MS. Those two assassinations-Evers' and Kennedy's-subsequently inspired Patton to act.

The White Guy in the Room: A Political Memoir is the story about Patton's journey from a young naïve college student from rural Iowa, with little or not knowledge and understanding of African-American history and culture, to a key and seasoned political player in the empowerment of blacks in America. Equally important, he offers an inside glimpse of the strategic roles of whites like him in the civil rights movement. Without many of them, the road traveled by African Americans would have been much harder. Together, whites and blacks sculpted an America of which they can be proud. And so, Patton's memoir is not just his own, it belongs to all of those Americans who rolled up their sleeves and assumed responsibility for creating a remarkable future.