Pearson suggests that an incident in 1958 of a deranged black woman stabbing King in Harlem represented a mortal danger to the very soul of a nation attempting to put racism behind it. He recreates America at the dawn of the civil rights movement, and in doing so probes and examines the living body politic of the nation, both black and white, and shows us how change really occurs: not in one grand gesture, but in a thousand small and contradictory ways. As truths and apocrypha clash in these pages, what emerges is a powerful picture of change in race perspective in America.