In Four Spirits, Sena Jeter Naslund weaves together the lives of blacks and whites, racists and civil rights advocates, violent repression and peaceful protest to create an epic tapestry of American social transformation. At the heart of the novel is a sheltered young white college student, raised by genteel aunts, who first witnesses and then joins the freedom movement in the racial hotbed that was Birmingham, Alabama, of the 1960s. Stella's life...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • "A dark and thoughtful tale... Grisham is at his best." —People
In the corridors of Chicago's top law firm: Twenty -six-year-old Adam Hall stands on the brink of a brilliant legal career. Now he is risking it all for a death-row killer and an impossible case.
Maximum Security Unit, Mississippi State Prison: Sam Cayhall is a former Klansman and unrepentant racist now...

"Even though slavery had ended in the 1860s, African Americans were still suffering under the weight of segregation a hundred years later. They couldn't go to the same schools, eat at the same restaurants, or even use the same bathrooms as white people. But by the 1950s, black people refused to remain second-class citizens and were willing to risk their lives to make a change"--

Set in Mississippi in 1964, this is a fictionalized version of the case of the murder of three young civil rights workers, the FBI's attempts to find the missing boys and the clash between the authorities and the locals in a Klan-dominated town.

"Years before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, Sylvia Mendez, an eight-year-old girl of Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage, played an instrumental role in Mendez v. Westminster, the landmark desegregation case of 1946 in California"--

Uses speeches, articles, and other writings of those involved to trace the history of the civil rights movement in the United States, primarily from 1954 to 1965.