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After four white teenagers desecrate an old slave burial ground and racial tensions erupt in violence, Danny Chaisson finds himself on the wrong side of a vicious war over land, power, and memory in a small Louisiana town when he is hired by a rich real estate developer to protect his interest in a valuable piece of property.

Sharing the boyhood rites of summer in 1966 Texas with his two best friends, thirteen-year-old Jim befriends an older African-American man who tells Jim his experiences as the son of an alcoholic, a Negro League baseball player, and a black man in a racially strained community.

Old Murphy’s unexpected return to the Eagen home in New Orleans sparks off reminiscences of the family’s history from the 1930s to the 1960s, when a misunderstanding leads to tragedy.

The racially motivated deadly beating of a black teenager in a small Mississippi town ripples through generations, changing forever the lives of everyone involved in the incident.

Investigating the rape and murder of a wealthy Southern woman, for which a young African American faces the death penalty, private investigator Charlie Parker finds his efforts complicated by the machinations of an old adversary.

Growing up in Alabama in the 1950s, two inseparable ten-year-old girls, one black and one white, discover the theft of money meant for polio victims and expose a racial injustice in the process.

In 1964 Kentucky, fourteen-year-old Jocie Brooke is about to experience an unforgettable summer — her father has found a new love, her hippie sister is about to have a baby, and her aunt is finally pleasurable to live with — but when a black family moves into the neighborhood, Jocie finds herself befriending a young boy that some townspeople shun.

In 1948 Louisiana, a young teacher is asked to impart some of his own pride and learning to a young Black man awaiting execution, only to come face to face with his own cynicism and hopelessness.

On the run from the law after being falsely accused of murdering his estranged wife and her lover, troubled World War I veteran Boyd Calvin joins forces with an African American who has also been wrongly accused of a crime, while a woman reporter and a veterans’ sanitarium manager work to prove Carter’s innocence.

An unlikely friendship between an eleven-year old Irish-Catholic boy and a lonely rabbi from Prague in 1947 Brooklyn has the two opening new windows of understanding with each other but still fighting the prejudices of the day.

While under investigation for excessive use of force, Detroit cop Danny Cavanaugh is assigned to a case involving the murder of a wealthy black couple, but the crime is not what it seems when another prominent black woman is murdered, forcing Danny to catch a psychotic killer before he becomes the next victim.

Ten years after leaving her hometown for college, Arlene Fleet finds she still has not escaped Possett, Alabama, when an old classmate turns up asking questions about a crime Arlene committed in her youth, forcing her into a confrontation with her past.

When young Harry Collins stumbles upon a mutilated body in the local river bottoms, the region beomes trapped in a nightmare of fear and racial tension, as a vicious serial killer stalks the town, a man is lynched, and local law enforcement races against time to find the murderer, in a suspenseful tale set in Depression-era East Texas.

The explosion of racial hate and violence in a small Alabama town is viewed by a little girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape.

Returning to her father’s house after her marriage breaks up, Tandi Crawford finds her fantasy of reliving a teenage romance a reality, which sets in motion a chain of events that forces her to confront her past and her ex-husband.

Placed side-by-side by their white employers, cook Tee Wee and housekeeper Icey forge a fractious bond based in their shared servitude and their equally painful pasts, a friendship that eventually serves to hold together the rural southern farm where they work.

In 1959, amidst the turmoil that erupted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s historic desegregation orders, ten-year-old Benjamin Rome becomes caught in the middle between his own family’s efforts to establish a private whites-only system and his close friend, the son of a black hired hand, and his growing understanding of prejudice.

To save the home that has belonged to his family for generations, Charles Blakey, a young black man whose life is slowly crumbling around him — his parents are dead, he is unemployed, he is drinking too much, and his friends have been deserting him — agrees to rent out his basement for the summer to a mysterious stranger.

The disappearance of a young African-American boy in a small Mississippi town and the violence that ensues plunge Fannie Leary, a girl who dreams of cooking her way to a better life, into her town’s own heart of darkness.

Receiving news that a company plans to dig up the area where her mother is buried, supposedly with a cache of jewels, Billy Beede, poor and pregnant with an illegitimate child, heads for Arizona with her aunt and uncle to not only rescue her mother’s body but search for the jewels they hope will bring them a new life.

Thrown together in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War, two teenagers — one a white girl, the other an African-American — lean on each other’s strengths in their struggles to stay alive and preserve their plantation home.

Left in the care of a distracted great aunt after her mother commits suicide, fifteen-year-old Alice begins hearing her mother’s voice and, through subsequent “conversations,” becomes more aware of her mother’s unconventional past.

After her father dies within hours of being married to a white woman, a ten-year-old black girl learns with her new mother to overcome grief and to adjust to a new place in their rural black South Carolina community.

The only African-American prosecutor in Jackson, Mississippi, James Reynolds finds himself in the morally challenging position of prosecuting a brilliant professor, a second-generation civil rights leader who has been accused of the vigilante killings of whites previously acquitted for hate crimes.

From an abusive German-Irish family, Augusta informally adopts Sunny Yamagata’s family as her own until the Yamagatas are sent to a Japanese-American internment camp in the 1930s, but they meet again in Mississippi in the 1960s.

After a series of family tragedies leaves fourteen-year-old Dove, her younger sister Molly, and their baby brother, Little Ellis, in the care of their seventeen-year-old stepmother, Crystal, Dove and Crystal risk everything to keep the family together, fleeing to a secret refuge called Swan Place, where they meet a group of women who change their lives in profound ways.

Scandalizing her rural Mississippi town when she draws a naked woman in the Bible during Sunday School, precocious fourteen-year-old Maddy is made to spend the weekends caring for her terminally ill aunt, a relationship that results in her confrontations with disturbing secrets that overshadow their community.

In 1902, small-town Loring, Mississippi, is torn apart by the escalating rivalry between a black postmistress and the prodigal son of a fallen plantation family.