Today, a national economy gone bust has derailed Black Americans' plans across the country. Gone are many of the economic gains, small as they were, achieved in the post-segregation era by millions of 1960s generation children and their children. Black America today is beset by job losses, business closures, pay cuts, furloughs, investment and savings losses, nose-diving home values and losses of homes and cars. As important, the economic shakeout has redefined the landscape ahead, as established ways of getting ahead--undergraduate and graduate degrees--and the infrastructure that nurtured it--affirmative action and diversity programs--have been turned on their heads. Thousands of high-income, white-collar jobs in the services industries, foundations and education have been eliminated. Diversity programs have been moved down the priority list of many employers. The gains of a whole era and the optimism that fed it have vanished. The economic slump is hitting people in different ways. Still, for all but a few of the wealthiest Black Americans, most are telling grim stories that illuminate the daily drum of aggregate numbers about double-digit unemployment, declining purchasing power, depleted savings and home foreclosures. They also tell a story of a determination to work through it.