Two new works of racial activism from North Carolina provide meaningful insights into ways white Southerners might confront their history in order to participate in a national movement to seek reconciliation, understanding, and reparations. A Sin By Any Other Name and The Tarboro Three demonstrate two different kinds of courage: the first is a young Christian minister’s personal tale of emerging progressive activism within a conservative region; the second book offers a historian’s unflinching gaze at a miscarriage of justice from the 1970s, an account that navigates a dangerous path through competing claims of racial and sexual politics.