The year is 1963, the peak of the U.S. civil rights movement. A quarter of a million people have just marched on Washington, D.C., where they have been galvanized by Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. In rebellion against her unconventional mother's passionate involvement in the struggle for racial equality, 17-year-old Beryl Rosinsky flees Washington and enrolls at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Here, in the heart of the segregated South, Beryl enters a strange world of paradoxes: a culture in which southern gentility masks deep-seated prejudice; a place in which protesters politely march single file on the sidewalks outside of "whites-only" shops; a "liberal" university that imposes a gender-based double standard of behavior upon its students.

Though Beryl struggles to blend in, to conform, to reject her destiny as her mother's daughter, her encounters with racism, bigotry, and hypocrisy ultimately force her to come to terms with her family's values - and teach her who she really is.