During a stormy summer of 1959,Willie Tarrant turned 12. The only daughter of widowed chemistry professor Dixon Tarrant, Willie became a key player in the battle to desegregate the Turner, Virginia, school system—two years after the integration fight was won in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The parents of Turner were paralyzed by years of complacency. Not until out-of-town black students sat at a "whites only" lunch counter in Woolworth's and were repeatedly arrested and brutalized, did the black parents of Turner finally find the strength to unite and declare war on their "separate and unequal" status in the town their ancestors built.

Told through the eyes of a 12-year-old girl coming of age in the segregated South, and interwoven with stories from the years of slavery and emancipation, 1959 is a vivid and beautifully-written account of one of the most important and difficult battles in American history—and one young girl's very personal self-discovery. 1959 is a story of rage, reticence, empowerment, unity, and, ultimately, hope.