“54 Miles” by Leonard Pitts, Jr.

Deep down inside, there’s a part of you that always wants to do right.Did someone teach you that? Or were you just modeling what your elders did when they did what was true and right? Either way, your moral compass points the way, always. You do right for the world, even if, as in the new novel “54 Miles” by Leonard Pitts, Jr., it’s the wrong personal decision for you.Sitting in church, hundreds of miles from home, Adam Simon felt the distance keenly.This surprised him. It wasn’t like he was close to his parents. No, his father, a white minister, had over-preached to Adam for too long, and his Black mother never showed Adam much warmth. With no siblings to help soften these facts, Adam left college to head to Alabama, to work with SNCC’s voter registry efforts.That was the plan, anyhow, but down-deep, Adam had no idea what he was doing. It was a good cause, a great and righteous one, but not without danger: he was almost killed while marching across the Edmund Pettis Bridge.And that’s how his frantic parents learned where he was: alerted by Adam’s parents, his Uncle Luther tracked Adam down in a Selma hospital,...