More than anything, feisty eleven-year-old Bernice Givens wants to be a freedom fighter in the civil rights movement that is sweeping the American South. She gets her chance when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. comes to Birmingham, Alabama, to start a campaign. But after what happens on the day she marches against segregation, Bernice spends her nights fending off bad dreams, her days avoiding the marches and all of her time hiding a shameful secret from her friends and family—that she is a deeply afraid.
During the historic spring and summer of 1963, with help from her family and her new friend Betsy, a blind girl from up North who also faces discrimination, Bernice struggles to understand fear and regain the courage to continue her fight against injustice.