There are mysteries to be solved in the cosmopolitan Southern city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama as the community prepares for the internationally-recognized Kentuck Festival in the adjoining city of Northport. Besides burglaries and assaults, Detective Addie Bramson finds herself coming to the aid of two sisters searching for their missing grandmother, mother, and baby brother. And all of this before she gets the phone call reporting murder. As the cases untangle, Addie learns that the secrets of some citizens hang heavy in the graveyard.

Describes the society and the institutions that went down during the Civil War and Reconstruction and the internal conditions of Alabama during the war. Emphasizes the social and economic problems in the general situation, as well as the educational, religious, and industrial aspects of the period.

Carl V. Harris’s Segregation in the New South, completed and edited by W. Elliot Brownlee, explores the rise of racial exclusion in late nineteenth-century Birmingham, Alabama. In the 1870s, African Americans in this crucial southern industrial city were eager to exploit the disarray of slavery’s old racial lines, assert their new autonomy, and advance toward full equality. However, most southern whites worked to restore the restrictive racial lines of the antebellum South or invent new ones that would guarantee the subordination of Black residents. From Birmingham’s founding in 1871, color lines divided the city, and as its people strove to erase the lines or fortify them, they shaped their futures in fateful ways. Social segregation is at the center of Harris’s history. He shows that from the beginning of Reconstruction southern whites engaged in a comprehensive program of assigning social dishonor to African Americans—the same kind of dishonor that whites of the Old South had imposed on Black people while enslaving them. In the process, southern whites engaged in constructing the meaning of race in the New South.

Includes section "Book reviews."

Examines the life stories and perspectives about freedom in relation to the figures depicted in an infamous Reconstruction-era political cartoon

Editor of The Tuscaloosa News for nine years, and active resident of the community for nearly 35 years, Donald Brown has lived many of Tuscaloosa's highs and lows. As an honored career journalist his reputation is one of sensing that what he hears and sees often may contain a timely, strong story. Such ability and experience formed the idea for this book: starting with the 1950s and going to through 2018--68 decisive, crucial years during which stepping stones often created a rough path that challenged Tuscaloosa to keep climbing ever upward toward its destiny.

"A slightly different version of this book was privately published by the author in 1973 and was reprinted in 1976"--Title page verso.