"I'm on the road parts of 45 weeks of the year. I travel to spend a lot of time with our affiliates. I travel to give speeches. I travel to participate in leadership gatherings with other folks of the African American community. I travel to raise money and to service and help those that support us. A lot of travel is for stuff going on in Washington," he said.

The Urban League, now 92 years old and a $66-million-a-year operation, describes itself as "the oldest and largest community-based movement devoted to empowering African Americans to enter the social and economic mainstream."

Despite his weighty responsibilities, photographs of Price in League literature show a bespectacled smiling man. Price appears undaunted by having to generate ideas to help the League achieve its goals, having to go to people for the money to implement those ideas, and having to make sure the ideas work. What sustains him, he said, "is the challenge of trying to deal with [the problems of] those who have not taken the journey to the mainstream and to the top."

Being president of the National Urban League, Price said, is a "dream job," something he had, for "my entire professional life," dreamt of doing. When Price became the League's seventh president, in 1994, the organization was struggling, he said. "We had financial challenges, programmatic challenges, governance challenges." The civil rights movement's success in shutting down legal segregation and the subsequent clamoring by white men who believed they were, as they put it, "victims of preferential treatment," brought about what many believed was a floundering of the marquee civil rights organizations. Price said his task was to position the National Urban League and its affiliates for a second century of leadership and service. And giving a clue as to what turns on a do-gooder, he said he found this immense institutional challenge "very energizing."

The National Urban League is not a membership organization but is linked to "affiliates" in more than 100 US cities. The affiliates, says the League's annual report, "focus on the needs of their unique communities, providing job training and employment counseling, offering small business assistance, and securing financing for homes." Over all, Price said, the League's "heightened focus is on academic achievement and getting our children and communities more focused on achievement." Even before he assumed the presidency, in 1992, he persuaded the National Guard to establish the National Guard Youth Challenge Corps, which has helped thousands of school dropouts, who are not guard members, to acquire general equivalency diplomas and further schooling. The League's Campaign for African American Achievement seeks to infuse youths with a zeal for achievement. Parents and children are involved in the League's National Achievers' Society, which has inducted into its ranks some 10,000 youths who have had B averages or better and who have served their communities. "They have no ambivalence about being high achievers; they don't consider it being 'white,'" said Price, alluding to a widely publicized comment by a black academic that black high school students view getting good grades as a "white thing."

Price's own career achievements have been scored almost entirely outside the realm of profit-making enterprises. Do-gooders don't work to get rich. A 1966 graduate of Yale Law School, he worked for a legal assistance program, an urban affairs consulting firm, a human resources administration, National Public Television, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Being a member of The New York Times editorial board for a few years was the only job he has ever held for an entity in business to make money.

However, he does have relationships with money-making businesses. The League has to get money from somewhere if it is to pay its bills and defeat racism. That "somewhere" turns out to be primarily major foundations, banking and investment firms, and many Fortune 500 corporations. Price himself is on the boards of directors of Verizon, Metropolitan Life and Sears. And this has opened his eyes "incredibly," he said.

"I didn't know anything about the innards of Fortune 500 companies before I served on the boards. I've now been able to bring to the League some of the practices that contribute to the efficiency of for-profit corporations. Some of the productivity standards, the quality preparation for board meetings, the attitude that in crisp decision making you really have to sell yourself, that you can't take anything for granted . In financial discipline, meeting financial targets; expanding or contracting to make sure you continue to meet them.

"I've learned about this wonderful notion of 'category killers' in corporate America," he continued, "where you may sail along thinking that you've got a lock on something and someone just comes in and, in poker lingo, 'calls and raises you' and you could be out of business." "A lot of nonprofit organizations and a lot of organizations that serve our people," he said, "feel that they're entitled to exist, entitled to support. What I've tried to say to my colleagues here and to my colleagues in the Urban League movement, for anybody that wants to be supportive of black folks, they've got a lot of options these days. You've got to compete and perform. We've got to earn the right to support every year, otherwise your support can atrophy."

As for his contributions to the boards, Price said he believes that "as someone who doesn't have a narrow business approach, the ways in which I see markets and customers and communities that I think help broaden their thinking. Looking at issues," he said, he "brings a will-this-survive-an-article in-The-New-York-Times perspective. If you read it, would it fly?"

The League's headquarters is located on the eighth floor of 120 Wall Street, at the eastern end of the fabled short and narrow thoroughfare. This is an office building whose tenants are all nonprofit entities. It is at the corner of South Street, and Price's office has five large windows that afford him magnificent, unobstructed East River views. Inside his office are prints by black artists and photographs of his wife and their three daughters.

The day of the interview, Price is wearing dark-sand colored, chalk-stripe trousers--the suit jacket is hanging in his closet--a white shirt and tan shoes. Standing at one window, he looks down to the foot of Wall Street, the site of what in 1711 was a market where Africans were bought and sold. And he feels that some sort of destiny brought the League there.