Jake Sloan has spent most of his adult life working in the areas of civil rights and affirmative action, advocating and fighting for income equality for African Americans. After serving honorably in the military, he started his career as a pipefitter, mainly working on the construction of nuclear submarines. After leaving that field, while attending college, he worked primarily in programs directed at equal access and equality in training and pay for African Americans in the construction building trades of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area. Since 1985, he has continued that work as owner of Davillier-Sloan, Inc., one of California’s largest labor-management consulting firms, with a focus on the construction industry. Mr. Sloan holds an M.A. in history from San Francisco State University. The writing of this book, and the latter stages of the research that went into it, are an outgrowth of his doctoral studies in Higher Education and Social Change at the Western Institute for Social Research (WISR) in Berkeley, California.