Those Few Passionate Years:

The author tells the story of her experience as a social work graduate student in Chicago who meets a civil rights worker on a picket line. The year was 1965. The two eventually marry and she moves to Atlanta where he is working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The author is disappointed to find that he is seldom home, while she tries to become acclimated to living in a new city and racially mixed neighborhood. She wonders about the safety of an interracial marriage in 1960s Georgia but gradually realizes that there are people who accept her and her marriage. She slowly adapts and experiences moments of enjoyment in encounters with civil rights workers, including Martin Luther King, until his assassination. In writing this memoir she realizes that King's assassination ends the movement even though the staff struggle to keep it going. By 1979, Carl had given up on it and joined the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union before his untimely death due to brain cancer. Meanwhile, the author has moved on from her position as a practicing social worker to becoming a faculty member at the University of Georgia.