Robbie Bridgeman and his friends Tara and Landon Phillips set out for a day of fishing on Sardis Lake, but they catch more than they bargained for when they reel in a giant prehistoric shark that is over sixty feet long.
Four black children growing up in rural Mississippi during the Depression experience racial antagonisms and hard times, but learn from their parents the pride and self-respect they need.
Examines the death of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African-American boy from Chicago murdered by two white men in August 1955 after he reportedly whistled at a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store, and discusses the killing's impact as a catalyst for the civil rights movement.
Gloriana faces her twelfth birthday in 1964 and struggles with the changes she sees happening around her, but while she struggles to understand the shift in her relationships with her sister--who is about to enter high school--and her best friend, Frankie, Gloriana witnesses tempers rise in a debate over a segregated public pool.
Young Cassie Logan endures humiliation and witnesses the horrors of a KKK cross-burning rampage before she fully understands the importance her family places on having land of their own.
Frank Russell, known as Shanks, wishes he could have gone with his father and brother to fight for Mississippi and the Confederacy, but his experiences with the war and his changing relationship with the family slave, Buck, change his thinking.
As the civil rights movement in the South gains momentum in 1963 and violence against African-Americans intensifies, residents of the small town of Kuckachoo, Mississippi, including seventh-grader Addie Ann Pickett, begin their own courageous struggle for racial justice.
