Publisher's Synopsis
Cheryl and Thomas met in the pandemonium of a Louisiana hospital filled with survivors from Hurricane Audrey in 1957. While immediately riveted to one another, storms would continue in the couple's lives as America was being swept by racial chaos. Soon American soldiers would patrol the streets around Central High School in Little Rock as the country began a very long battle with school desegregation. Cheryl and Tom's undergraduate experience in New Orleans would quickly become entangled in the turmoil of the lynching of Mack Charles Parker in nearby Bogalusa and Louisiana's governor would be spirited off to a mental hospital in Texas. By the time Cheryl relocated to New York for medical school, her relationship with Tom became consumed by fear as he was repeatedly attacked by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi and East Texas. Once again an American President would send in federal troops to calm rioting, this time at the University Mississippi. In New York, Cheryl could only follow the events in Mississippi that swirled around and threatened Tom's life. She watched with increasing desperation and anxiety as the assassination of Medgar Evers; the murder of Herbert Lee by his lifelong friend, a white man and a member of the Mississippi legislature provided grizzly photographs for the covers of the New York tabloids. When Cheryl thought things couldn't get any worse, civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney disappeared after being arrested. As time passed and it seemed obvious that the men had been killed, President Johnson ordered a massive effort to find the missing men or their bodies. When Governors George Wallace and Paul Johnson callously joked about her husband and the other two activists, the doggedly determined and extraordinarily brave Rita Schwerner stepped to the fore. The diminutive young lady refused to be bullied by the segregationist governors and even by President Johnson's personal representative in the Mississippi Burning investigation, Allen Dulles. Cheryl and the whole world watched and waited, praying that Mississippi would not completely disintegrate into an orgy of violence and sweep away the man she so completely loved.
