In 1946 Clanton, Mississippi, World War II hero Pete Banning calmly and inexplicably kills his pastor and friend, the Reverend Dexter Bell, and refuses to defend his actions during the subsequent trial. Pete Banning was Clanton's favorite son, a returning war hero, the patriarch of a prominent family, a farmer, father, neighbor, and a faithful member of the Methodist church. Then one cool October morning in 1946. he rose early, drove into town, walked...

In 1954, 13-year-old Jubie, traveling with her family and her family's black maid Mary Luther--who has always been there for her, making up for her father's rages and her mother's neglect--encounters racial tension and tragedy.

As a young black man in the segregated South of the 1920s, author Richard Wright was hungry to explore new worlds through books, but was forbidden from borrowing them from the library. This book tells of his love of reading, and how his unwavering perseverance, along with the help of a co-worker, came together to make Richard's dream a reality.

While on a trip in 1956 to visit her grandmother in the South, six-year-old Sarah Marie experiences segregation for the first time, but discovers that things have changed by the time she returns the following year.

"Opal Pruitt is just about to turn 18 in the oppressively hot summer of 1936. She works hard at her job, takes care of her beloved Granny, and dreams about boys with her cousin Lucille. The young black teenager's journey to adulthood will be forged in fire, though, as the Ku Klux Klan attacks her Colored Town neighborhood and she endures a vicious beating at the hands of an unknown white attacker. Although slavery is over, Parsons, Georgia is still...