As the civil rights movement in the South gains momentum in 1963--and violence against African Americans intensifies--the black residents, including seventh-grader Addie Ann Pickett, in the small town of Kuckachoo, Mississippi, begin their own courageous struggle for racial justice.

When Jiminy retreats to her grandmother Willa's farm in rural Mississippi, she is shocked to discover there was once another Jiminy-- the daughter of her grandmother's longtime housekeeper, Lyn-- who was murdered along with Lyn's husband four decades earlier, in a civil rights era hate crime. With the help of Lyn's nephew, Bo, Jiminy sets out to solve the long-ago murder, to the dismay of those who would prefer to let sleeping dogs lie.

In the summer of 1964, 19-year-old Celeste Tyree, straddling the strong race consciousness of her father and the race aversion of her estranged mother, takes time off from college and her white boyfriend, traveling from Michigan to Mississippi to lend her efforts to Freedom Summer.

History notes that the ugly feud between J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King, Jr., marked by years of illegal surveillance and the accumulation of secret files, ended on April 4, 1968 when King was assassinated by James Earl Ray. But that may not have been the case. Now, fifty years later, former Justice Department agent, Cotton Malone, must reckon with the truth of what really happened that fateful day in Memphis. It all turns on an incident from...