There are so many things to fight for — for peace, for a certain right, towards some social justice — that I’ve never been able to fight for any of them. It seems so exhausting and ultimately futile that I get discouraged before I even begin. But there’s always the desire to be so consumed by a cause that you actually make a change. And I feel I speak for a fair portion of my generation. Perhaps Radiohead put it best: “I wish it was the sixties, I wish I could be happy, I wish, I wish, I wish that something would happen.”

In 1965, author Michael Royce, at age 18, joined volunteers in Jackson, Mississippi, to register black voters and demonstrate for equal rights. He wished that something would happen, and it did — both in Jackson and in Royce. Mississippi Freedom Summer in Eight Vignettes is both scenes from Royce’s time spent fighting for what he believed in and time he spent growing up. He wrote each originally to give to his children to help them understand what happened in our country at that time. As readers we learn what it’s like to have that kind of hope.