Short Synopsis
The author of the critically acclaimed The Last Thing You Surrender, Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s 54 Miles launches forward twenty years to the fateful weeks of March 1965—from the infamous "Bloody Sunday" march to the triumphant entry into Montgomery that climaxed the voting rights campaign—and the families who find themselves confronting the past amid another flashpoint in American history.

Full Synopsis
Young Adam, who has been raised in Harlem by his white father, George, and Black mother, Thelma, goes back to his parents' home state of Alabama to participate in the voting rights campaign, only to be brutalized in the Bloody Sunday melee. He is still recovering from this when he is struck a heavy emotional blow, learning for the first time—and in the cruelest way imaginable—of a family secret that sends him spiraling and plunging further into danger. To save him, and any hope for their relationship, Thelma is drawn back, for the first time in twenty years, to the South she both hates and fears, and to a reckoning that may result in an incalculable loss.

Meanwhile, Thelma's brother Luther is also spiraling, but in a different way. Forty-two years after his parents were lynched before his eyes, and twenty years after the man who led the lynch mob walked out of court a free man, Luther has just made a shocking discovery. He's found the murderer, Floyd Bitters, helpless and enfeebled in a rest home—unable to move or even to speak. The old man is literally at Luther's mercy. And Luther, who has never overcome this trauma that defined his life, is suddenly forced to relive it all again as he grapples with the awful question of what justice now demands.

"A well-researched, powerfully written novel that takes readers into the heart of the civil rights movement in the South, leaving out none of the anguish, uncertainty, and despair felt by so many involved, but also remembering the courage and hope demonstrated by the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marchers." ---Library Journal Starred Review