"Sara King has nothing, save for her secrets and the baby in her belly, as she boards the bus to Memphis, hoping to outrun her past in Chicago. She is welcomed with open arms by Mama Sugar, a kindly matriarch and owner of the popular boardinghouse The Scarlet Poplar. Like many cities in early 1960s America, Memphis is still segregated, but change is in the air. News spreads of the Freedom Riders. Across the country, people like Martin Luther King...

"1965 Growing up in the well-to-do town of Round Hill, North Carolina, Ellie Hockley was raised to be a certain type of proper Southern lady. Enrolled in college and all but engaged to a bank manager, Ellie isn't as committed to her expected future as her family believes. She's chosen to spend her summer break as a volunteer helping to register black voters. But as Ellie follows her ideals fighting for the civil rights of the marginalized, her scandalized...

Follows the 1964 Civil Rights-era relationship between a passive-resistance protégé of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a Harlem black culture supporter of Malcolm X.

On Election Day, as they walk through their vibrant neighborhood on their way to vote, Quetta, her mother and her grandmother face obstacle after obstacle before and after reaching their voting station, showing Quetta the importance of raising her voice.

"It's 1959. Laura Graham, a fifteen-year-old white girl, moves with her family from the urban north to her father's hometown in rural Kentucky, where she enrolls in a recently desegregated high school. She makes a good start at adjusting--she tries to lose her Yankee accent, she makes friends, and she falls in love. But the bullying and injustice her Black classmates suffer leave her torn between wanting to speak out and fear of losing what friends...