(photo of Susan L. Taylor by Marc Brasz) When the NAACP in 2006 presented author and social activist Susan L. Taylor with its President’s Award, the organization publicly acknowledged what readers of Essence® Magazine had been experiencing for nearly four decades. Namely, that Ms. Taylor is among the most effective, dynamic, and beloved human resources on the planet. In All About Love (Urban Books) a rich of harvest of writings from Taylor ’s “In the Spirit” column, it’s easy to see why. A collection of more than 80 empowering editorials and three bonus dialogues, All About Love is all about life as we know, live, dread, treasure, and live it. Unlike too many book collections of short essays or creative nonfiction, this is not one aimed at demonstrating the intellectual profundity or virtuosity of the author. These are the observations, emotions, realizations and affirmations by which generations of women––and sometimes men––have mapped out the course of their daily lives and es...

“All this life and love and strife and failure––is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day?” –– The Wisdom of WEB Du Bois The first half of the twentieth century in the United States and much of the world was an era when racial and ethnic differences determined even the most uncontrived actions. Stepping into a restaurant, boarding a train, engaging in sexual relationships, or running or voting for a public office were all ruled by notions of differences between groups. Race remained an element that tempted society in general and historians in particular to half-truths, shortsightedness, and outright falsifications. However, as W.E.B. Du Bois noted in his many observations on the nature of history, it was important to realize that the record of human interaction was much more than an account of entanglements between people with varying shades of skin color. It was also the log of humankind’s ability or inability to rise above age-old phobi...