As Alabama's Senator-elect, Hugo Black returns to the circuit court where he began the practice of law 20 years earlier in order to conduct his last jury trial in a case that begs for the majesty of law. Black's last jury trial reenacts a childhood tragedy that brings him home again to face the lessons of his early life.

The case began on an ordinary holy day almost two years before the state's white citizens elected Black to the U.S. Senate. It was a chilly, cloudy Sunday morning in December l924, when Will Smelley stuffed $30 in his trousers pocket and left his farmhouse outside Talladega.

In March 1925...Luke Ware stood trial for his life in a rural community that was ... a small town at the crossroads of an Old South and its new aspirations....Talladega .. was taken from the Muskogee Indian word for "frontier town," but its local theater, opera house, and public library were monuments to the small town's appreciation of culture, learning, and reason as important guides in the life of a settled community.

...on the town's outskirts sat Talladega College, one of the state's few private black schools of higher learning, started by white missionaries during Reconstruction.

A few nights after his verdict, on Friday, March 13, Ware was in his cell when the courthouse caught fire... the courthouse had burned leaving only the brick walls and the gray stoned columns.

The new building had no cupola clock. Gone, too, were the balconies once imitating those on which ancient Greeks stood to address their slaves. Talladega's revived house of justice was, nonetheless, an ambitious menagerie of symbols.

In some of Talladega's handsome homes, white women took aside their trusted black maids to say confidentially, "I know he didn't kill Will Smelley."

Regardless of their opinions, Talladega's black folk were practically helpless to do anything about such injustice .. "Whatever Mr. Jake said, that was it."

G. S. (Chum) Smelley" who was a "street boss" in nearby Sylacauga ...did a good job of supervising local jail inmates who cleaned and repaired the town's streets.

In early November, Senator Heflin appeared before more than a thousand citizens in Chum Smelley's Sylacauga, where Cotton Tom excited the crowd with extravagant condemnations of the evils of Catholicism and "Victor Hanson's newspapers."

In the privacy of his own study, where the underlined copy of Henry Maine's Ancient Law stood on the shelf as a dutiful reminder of that day in Talladega's courthouse, Black confessed to his own son decades afterwards: "It was inexcusable..."