When Marcia Herman-Giddens was five years old, her family moved to Birmingham, a steel town. It was where wealthy industrialists, nicknamed the “Big Mules,” controlled local politics and helped perpetuate systemic racial inequality and Jim Crow segregation in Alabama. She was the only child of Edwin Herman, an easygoing Pennsylvania native and federal government administrator and Lucy Herman, a woman from Florida who frequently used the N-word at home and took pride in knowing that her family once owned slaves. Herman-Giddens, however, began sensing unfairness in the world starting in the first grade after noticing the inequality between girls and boys in her Dick and Jane reader, and, at age 10, she witnessed the dilapidated housing units where many Blacks in the city lived. In her memoir, Unloose My Heart, the author describes growing up as a middle-class white girl on Birmingham’s Southside, participating in the civil rights movement, working for racial justice as a young adult, and, while investigating and coming to terms with her forebears’ slaveholding past, she learns she has many Black cousins.