Meridian is about Meridian Hill, a young black woman in the late 1960s who is attending college as she embraces the civil rights movement at a time when the movement becomes violent. The movement gave her a chance to start life over again; there was a quality of intelligence in it, a refusal to accept most of what she took for granted, that attra Tommy tells Truman that Lynne is with him solely to atone for her sins, out of guilt for the racism Black men and women had suffered for centuries. The experiences of Louvinie and Feather Mae, for example, frame the issues that Meridian and her father face. Throughout the book Meridian risked her life to affirm the principle of integration, for it had already been established as law, rather than give up the practice of non violence.

However, it is no doubt a book that deserves to be read and to be admired for the author’s motivations in light of the social dynamic at the time she wrote it (1970s), if not for its idiosyncratic presentation and elusive syntax. I came to America just after the "Greensboro sit-in" and was stunned to find out that there was this terrible division of white and black people and I started to read their stories. Walker resisted such rigid control of her life and transferred to Sarah Lawrence College, north of New York City. Meridian's political commitment is not to end in martyrdom: there have been too many martyrs to her cause. Truman and Lynne, now married, are living in Mississippi, where her whiteness begins to endanger them and the movement.

There was always her dedication to help people, even if the “Movement” group she became associated with was less then an upstanding group.

The majority of black townspeople were sympathetic to the Movement from the first, and told Meridian she was doing a good thing. The book centers around a story of the struggle for black people to obtain the rights granted them by the Civil Rights Act in the American South. In many ways, Meridian anticipates and paves the way for Walker’s future preoccupations: it focuses on women’s lives and examines how the past and the present interconnect and construct the future.Truman struggles to understand the mysterious illness that has taken hold of her, causing her to experience fainting spells and paralysis. The story follows her life into the 1970s through a relationship that ultimately fails, and her continued efforts to support the movement. Events are strung over 25 years, although most occur between the height of the civil rights movement and the present.