The book features the life stories of over 80 of the Freedom Riders who fought to desegregate interstate bus transportation in the Deep South, and includes both their original mug shots and contemporary photographic portraits taken 45 or more years later by Etheridge.

Vivian, John Lewis, Carol Ruth Silver, Michael Audain, Bob Filner, Wyatt Tee Walker, Charles Grier Sellers, Byron Baer, Bernard Lafayette, Helen Singleton, and John Gager.

Hertzberg described the mug shots as "a remarkable exercise in folk portraiture" and called Etheridge's follow-up portraits "terrific".

[2] A reviewer in the Los Angeles Times wrote that the emotions and values of the Freedom Riders are reflected in the mug shots: "Vividly rendered on those young faces -- excited, angry, naive, fearful, idealistic".

[5] A reviewer for The New York Observer said that the book serves as "something of a closing meditation on the five decades of stirring progress" that led to the 2008 presidential candidacies of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.