Patty, a young enslaved girl, shares some insight about life on a South Carolina plantation.

After serving a 19-year sentence, Jean Valjean ends up on the Lord Bishop's doorstep, where he is offered a warm meal and bed to sleep in. Although he steals from the bishop, in the end, he earns redemption and a second chance thanks to the bishop's wise and caring ways.

This story is the retelling of Robert Smalls' escape from slavery with his entire family in tow. With a plan "as dangerous as it was brilliant," Smalls commandeers a Confederate ship and successfully navigates it out of Charleston's blockaded port and into the hands of the Union army.

Although raised in a prosperous and prestigious African-American home in Tuskegee, Ala., Sammy Younge found himself drawn most to the civil rights movement. While the cause cost him his life, his actions and determination helped to transform this Southern city.

This story follows a girl who befriends the first African American to attend High Point Central High School, as a result of desegregation. What begins as an unintended and awkward experience in the cafeteria, becomes a strong and admirable friendship.

Bayard Rustin was an African American leader who worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in the 1940s and 1950s for equal rights for all Americans using nonviolence. In this story, he writes about the struggle for an African American man to order a simple hamburger at a restaurant in the Midwest.

In this excerpt from his book, Walking with the Wind, John Lewis describes his involvement in the sit-ins in Nashville, Tenn., in the spring of 1960.

“In response to legislation that would have criminalized immigrants, thousands of high school students from across the country walked out of their classrooms and into history.”