Jefferson County Solicitor Hugo Black initiates a politically dangerous grand jury investigation of the abuse of African American prisoners by the Bessemer police. Despite his adroit, legal maneuvers and efforts to de-emphasize race, Black meets strong resistance in and out of courtrooms to his color-blind application of the law. At the same time, Birmingham white politics is rapidly fracturing, as shown by the defeat of City Commissioner A.O. Lane, Black's mentor, at the hands of a quirky socialist. Ignoring the political trends, Black pushes ahead to enforce the law against lawlessness, racial terror, and class-based privilege.

Birmingham's first industrialist, Henry DeBardeleben, had built Bessemer thirty years earlier ...the town's original buildings were a curious assortment of facades that DeBardeleben had transported from the New Orleans Cotton Exposition of 1884 to satisfy his fancy for a little suburban showcase.

In September 1915, when Bessemer police officer A. D. Maddox arrived at the grand jury room on the second floor of the Jefferson County courthouse, he seemed perfectly willing to talk about the common ways of law enforcement in his town, initially incapable of imagining that racial violence was outside the grace of law or white morality.

In words that Judge Black wrote, jurors ... called Bessemer's police practices dishonorable, tyrannical, despotic, and cowardly. They found "a uniform practice has been made of taking helpless prisoners, in the late hours of night, into a secluded room . . . and there beat them until they were red with their own blood, in the efforts to obtain confessions . . ."