One call changes our course. When my world tilts and my pilot’s past comes roaring to the present, I’m left reeling. Except, he’s not the only one with secrets. Old friends return, bringing with them more than I’m prepared to deal with. I need the man I love, now more than ever, but it feels like he’s slipping through my fingers. Our hot nights and mornings lounging in bed, I’m not ready for them to become a memory. I want him by my side. Radek has to fight for me. The alternative is too difficult to contemplate.

Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall said of Wiley Austin Branton that he “devoted his entire life to fighting for his own people.” There When We Needed Him is the story of that fight, which began with Branton's being one of the first black students at the University of Arkansas Law School and which took him to the highest levels of business and government. From his private law practice in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Branton became, along with Marshall, counsel for the Little Rock Nine in their 1957 efforts to integrate Central High School. Under his leadership of the Atlanta-based Voter Education Project, more than six hundred thousand black voters were registered from 1962 to 1965. He later became executive secretary of President Lyndon Johnson's Council on Equal Opportunity and special assistant to attorneys general Nicholas Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark. He provided leadership to the United Planning Organization, the Alliance for Labor Action, and the NAACP; and he was dean of Howard University Law School. At Branton’s funeral in 1988, former Arkansas senator David Pryor described him as “quiet and unassuming. . . . It is his humility and desire to always put the goals of the civil rights movement before self which probably accounts for the fact that [he] was not more famous than he was.” The influence of this quiet and unassuming man continues to be felt decades later.

This wry look at childhood, instant gratification, fashion, femininity, relationships, and getting older features quotes from insightful women, including Lily Tomlin, Bette Midler, Dorothy Parker, and Mae West. Accompanying each quotation is a photo that captures the "inner child" in us all. 50 photos.