Weaving together the lives of blacks and whites, racists and civil rights advocates, and the events of peaceful protest and violent repression, Sena Jeter Naslund creates a tapestry of American social transformation at once intimate and epic. In Birmingham, Alabama, twenty-year-old Stella Silver, an idealistic white college student, is sent reeling off her measured path by events of 1963. Combining political activism with single parenting and night-school...

A young white girl rides a bus to the March on Washington in 1963 and sees that Dr. King's dream belongs to all Americans.

In the summer of 1968, after traveling from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to spend a month with the mother they barely know, eleven-year-old Delphine and her two younger sisters arrive to a cold welcome as they discover that their mother, a dedicated poet and printer, is resentful of the intrusion of their visit and wants them to attend a nearby Black Panther summer camp.

Spanning seven decades and two continents, this chronicle of one woman's remarkable journey through some of history's most turbulent eras follows Claudia Patterson, freedom fighter, businessperson, wife, master of languages and ultimately, savior of a European dynasty, as she encounters four men who impact her life along the way.

Raised by her aunt until she is six, Betty, who will later marry Malcolm X, joins her mother and stepfamily in 1940s Detroit, where she learns about the civil rights movement.

From the back of the bus, an African American child watches the arrest of Rosa Parks.

During the turbulent 1960s, the reader's plot choices determine their role in the historic fight for equal rights.

In 1966 Illinois, twelve-year-old Wilhelmina, convinced that she, her parents, and sisters are Abraham Lincoln's family reincarnated, determines to keep them from suffering the same fates, which is complicated when she and her father become involved in the Civil Rights Movement.

Set against the turbulence of the Civil Rights Movement, twelve-year-old Onyx dreams of becoming an astronaut as he navigates his mother's early-onset dementia and avoids foster care.