More than twenty years after the civil rights movement, one question still lingers: What significant changes, if any, have resulted from its efforts? In search of the answer, author Tom Dent takes us on a unique journey through the contemporary South, revisiting the places where protesters and their supporters took a stand for equality. Dent interviews blacks, whites, civil rights workers, and just plain folks about the sit-ins, student demonstrations, and protests that shaped the Movement. In their own words, the participants discuss the impressions these events left on their communities. Dent's journey becomes a personal one as well, as he examines the role the Movement has played in his own life. Raised in New Orleans before the legal obstructions were dismantled, he was encouraged by his family to seek his fortune outside the South, hut soon returned home. Here Dent takes readers on a trip through the South and into the past, visiting such places as the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, where sit-down strikes in 1960 ignited a new phase of black protest against racial injustice; the campus of South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, where, in 1968, one of the most blatantly violent reactions to student demonstrations occurred; Albany, Georgia, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., led one of the first mass-movement civil rights efforts in 1962; and Selina, Alabama, the starting point for Dr. King's 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery March, which dramatized the denial of the right to vote. Using smaller towns--"more interesting, more resistant to change, more reflective of the South as a region" than their larger counterparts--Dent demonstrates how the civil rights movement continues to make a positive impact on people's lives today, but also learns that the goal of equality hasn't been fully achieved. In portraying genuine and engaging southern personalities, Dent takes us on a special trip of discovery and hope, letting us see and feel how the historic fight for civil rights still shapes our world today.--Adapted from book jacket.