If the Moon Had Willow Trees

With each assassination, each lynching, each godawful assault against blacks and whites who fought for civil rights in the Sixties, cities burned. Today, George Floyd's public lynching set the entire world on fire. Some say everything has changed, others say nothing's changed. What we know, for sure, is the heroes then and now are ordinary people like The Detroit Eight.

The award-winning author of The Otherness Factor takes us to Detroit during the turbulence of the Sixties.

Detroit--July 25, 1967, two days after Detroit cops raid a blind pig (speakeasy) inciting the biggest race riot in American history. Maggie Soulier wakes to a deejay's cry for 'anyone left in the city' to hustle pop to police sweltering at highway checkpoints leading into the firestorm.

Maggie's not a hippie chick looking for a cause, she's the daughter of notorious French Canadian secessionist radicals who disappeared without a trace. A grad student on a visa, Maggie covers absences at a pizzeria to support her stateside civil rights work. Delivering soft drinks to keep armed men from having a meltdown sounded simple. That was before she met Sam Tervo on the wrong side of a gun--before she offered him a Coke, before shared laughter ricocheted against shrieking sirens and a darkening sky.

Sam, a fierce human rights advocate, thinks he's being targeted by mafia types who want something; the question is what. More and more he relies on his friend Clyde Webster, a black civil rights leader and Maggie's co-worker, to guide him through this underworld. Cold sober in the ash, soot and rubble, Clyde pulls together The Eights: eight working-poor, part-time activists, to curb white flight and integrate the burbs.

With the intrigue, corruption, brutality and bigotry, The Eights experience the love, laughter, irony and self-reflection of blacks and whites redefining friendship and transforming the world with pocket change.


Binding Type: Paperback
Author: Hall, Kathleen
Published: 06/22/2017
Publisher: Collaborative Options
ISBN: 9780990390428
Pages: 268
Weight: 0.87lbs
Size: 9.02h x 5.98w x 0.61d