Three eighth-grade friends, preparing for the International Double Dutch Championship jump rope competition in their home town of Cincinnati, Ohio, cope with Randy's missing father, Delia's inability to read, and Yo Yo's encounter with the class bullies.
Two fifteen-year-old girls--one a slave and the other an indentured servant--escape their Carolina plantation and try to make their way to Fort Moses, Florida, a Spanish colony that gives sanctuary to slaves.
Shortly after her boyfriend Josh is killed in a pledging accident, November Nelson learns she is pregnant and fears she has no one to turn to, until she finds solace in the arms of Josh's cousin Jericho.
The Black Dinosaurs, Ziggy, Rico, Rashawn, and Jerome discover an old tunnel that was one of the safe havens used by escaped slaves. But while in the tunnel a portion collapsed and they have to think of something soon or they may be trapped in the past forever.
Ziggy, Rico, Rashawn, and Jerome, four curious African-American kids, find themselves trapped in an Underground Railroad passageway under their school, with no way out but to travel its tunnels as escaped slaves did over one hundred years before.
The death of high school basketball star Rob Washington in an automobile accident affects the lives of his close friend Andy, who was driving the car, and many others in the school.
Sylvia Patterson's life suddenly changes with the integration of Little Rock's Central High in 1957 when she is selected to be one of the first black students to attend the previously all white school.
