Money Rock

Money Rock is the gripping story--at once action-packed, uplifting, and tragic--of a striving African American family, three generations swept up and transformed by the 1980s cocaine epidemic. This epic account spanning more than five decades begins in 1963 when Belton Lamont Platt (who would come to be known as Money Rock) is born in a newly integrated North Carolina hospital to Carrie, an activist mother who found herself married to an abusive, alcoholic hustler yet still manages to become a dynamic community leader and advocate. It ends with Belton's sons, three of whom die violently as teenagers, and one--his oldest--who's trying to transcend a criminal past in a world where the odds are stacked against him.

Veteran reporter Pam Kelley takes readers through a shootout that shocks the city, a botched FBI sting, and a trial with a judge known as "Maximum Bob." Money Rock shows in living color how racist policies on housing, education, and crime laid the groundwork for the cocaine epidemic, then mass incarceration, and now the widening economic inequality that's unraveling the fragile racial progress that Charlotte and other New South boom towns once touted with pride.