“All the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skin doll was what every girl child treasured,” wrote Toni Morrison in her award winning novel, “The Bluest Eye”. What can a black girl do to try and reach such a narrow vision of beauty?

Mark Brown’s father walked through the common area and into the fraternity house dining room, peering at the photos on the walls.  Hundreds of young men dressed in clean dark suits and crisp white shirts stared back at him through the rectangular frames.

Here we are driving around the city of Gainesville in the year 2009. It is a Saturday in the close of September, and the sun is creating one of the last long, glorious, warm southern evenings before the creeping chills of fall come reluctantly back to North Central Florida. On this slow evening we are taking a look at Gainesville in leisure.