A completely updated and revised edition of a bestselling book that has helped tens of thousands of people learn how to network effectively, Success Runs in Our Race is more important than ever in this fluctuating economy. With scores of anecdotes taken from interviews with successful African Americans -- from Keith Clinkscales, founder and former CEO of Vanguarde Media, to Oprah Winfrey -- Fraser shows how to network for information, for influence, and for resources. Readers will learn, among other things, how to cultivate valuable listening skills, which conferences blacks are most likely to attend when looking to build their business network, and how to effectively circulate a résumé.

More than a guide for personal achievement, this is an information-packed bible of networking that also seeks to inspire a social movement and a rebirth of the "Underground Railroad," in which successful African Americans share the lessons of self-determination and empowerment with those still struggling to scale the ladder of success.

God bless the Underground

Great praise to it shall ever resound.

The train, it never left the track.

No one was lost. No one turned back.

-- Frank Morris

Atop a bale of hay in the back of a badly dented pickup

truck, Juliet E. K. Walker, Ph.D., rides through a rutted

hog run in a remote corner of the Midwest. When the

lurching truck reaches the edge of a cornfield, the University of

Illinois history professor, who has done postdoctoral work at Harvard, jumps out and plunges in between the tight rows.

She walks for fifty yards through the clawing cornstalks until

she comes to a wooded patch of ground overgrown with Queen

Anne's lace and shaded by hundred-year-old evergreens. Filtered

sunlight lands upon the bleached faces of twenty weathered tombstones in the clearing. One of the stones, a simple cracked tablet that has been knocked flat to the ground, marks the final resting place of Walker's personal and professional inspiration: her greatgreat-grandfather, Free Frank McWorter.

The offspring of a West African slave woman and her Irish-

Scot slave master, McWorter was born into servitude in 1777 in

South Carolina. As a young slave, he became manager of his master's farm in Kentucky, and earned extra wages by hiring his work out to others. He put those wages toward the establishment of his own business mining and selling saltpeter for the manufacture of gunpowder. With the profits from these ventures and others, Free Frank eventually purchased not only his own freedom, but that of his wife, Lucy, and fourteen other family members spanning four generations. He later moved his freed family to Illinois, where he used his entrepreneurial skills to buy land and become the first African American to legally establish his own town, New Philadelphia. From this town, populated by both blacks and whites, Free Frank operated a station in the Underground Railroad, covertly shuttling some of the hundred thousand runaway slaves who found freedom from slave masters and bounty hunters to the North and Canada.

In her doctoral dissertation, "Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on

the Antebellum Frontier," Walker wrote of her little-known ancestor's dedication to improving not only his own life, but that of all black people.

Free Frank achieved success that was almost unheard-of for

blacks of his time, and once he achieved that success, he dedicated himself to reaching back and elevating the lives of others of his race.

A NEW MILLENNIUM: A NEW UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

With this book, I am calling for the revival of that Afrocentric

communal spirit among the millions of black Americans who are

seeking personal and professional success, as well as for those who have already achieved success and now wish to build upon it and to spread it to others of our race.

Afrocentricity, which will be discussed at length later in this

book, promotes the oneness of all things. Cooperation, collectivism, and sharing are the essential elements. Community is considered before the individual. Many of our black organizations have come to embrace Afrocentric principles. It is my belief, and that of many other blacks, that the image of the black community and in too many cases the actions of black people do not reflect the image and actions of our success-oriented ancestors. I'm speaking of great people such as the kings and queens of Africa, and more modern figures such as Sojourner Truth, Free Frank, Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. These are the role models for a successful black community. These are the people who fought for us all.

Consider this then your personal guidebook for a...

George C. Fraser is the chairman and CEO of FraserNet, Inc., and publisher of Success-Guide Worldwide: The Networking Guide to Black Resources. He is the founder of the annual Power-Networking Conference, one of black America's largest conferences. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.