In 1916, Birmingham residents celebrate the anniversaries of the Emancipation Proclamation, statewide prohibition, and especially their city's hosting of the Confederate Reunion, trumpeted by repeated showings of Birth of a Nation. Jefferson County Solicitor Hugo Black continues his aggressive enforcement of the law, including a string of unique statutes banning illegal liquor and liquor advertisements. This zealous enforcement earns him an unenviable appointment as a special state assistant attorney general to assist Alabama Attorney General Logan Martin with the clean up of massive illegal liquor in Girard, (modern-day Phenix City) on the Chattahoochee River across from Columbus Georgia. With legal acumen and courtroom histrionics, Black enables the quick destruction of one of the largest cashes of illegal liquor in the country. In Birmingham, however, corporate attorney Forney Johnston leads an effort to remove Black from office. After a series of bizarre legal tactics, Johnston succeeds in forcing Black to resign his office as America enters World War I.

On the fifty-third anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Senator Frank White--one of the last Confederate veterans to sit in the U.S. Senate from Alabama--stood before more than a thousand African Americans overcrowding the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. "You might suppose that I fought to keep you in slavery," White bluntly informed his listeners, "but not at all. The institution never did appeal to me."

White paid tribute to Tuskegee's Booker T. Washington, who had died two months earlier. The Senator described the black educator as "my Washington," who "did not work for one race, but all the races."

White saved his greatest praise for the Emancipator. "Lincoln, a Southern man brought about your freedom," argued the old lawyer ...He was a Southern man, born just 60 miles from where Jefferson Davis was born," the Senator insisted. "We must remember him; we must erect a statute to him..."

A few weeks before Emancipation Day, large crowds of white citizens attended the Jefferson Theater for the city's first showing of D. W. Griffith's photoplay, Birth of a Nation. With a native Alabamian in a leading role, this "supreme motion picture of the South" aroused enthusiasm and deep, emotional responses...

A statewide ban of liquor in January 1915, passed over the veto of Governor Charles Henderson and four years ahead of national Prohibition, provided what some saw as an opportunity to restore a new humanity and morality befitting the nation's Bible Belt and a state with one of the highest numbers of Baptists.

Birmingham was preparing to host the twenty-sixth annual convention of the United Confederate Veterans.... As General Bennett Young, commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veterans, stated upon his arrival in Birmingham: "A Southern man would be a miscreant and a coward who failed to keep alive the memories of the Confederate Army."

As many as one hundred thousand people, more than half the population of metro Birmingham, turned out to cheer wildly the triumphant march of veterans and their supporters.

Henry Walthall, the Birmingham native who played a Confederate star in Birth of a Nation, wore a slouch hat in the style of an old Southern gentleman. He rode a dark bay horse alongside the actual officers of the old Confederacy...

Because of prohibition, this public celebration would have to survive with nothing stronger than barrels of cool rainwater, placed around Birmingham's streets to refresh the old warriors as they strolled about the city.

[During the] Confederate reunion, twenty-two men had begun to assemble in a passenger car attached to an idling L&N engine a hundred miles south in the Montgomery rail yard.

By 7:00 a.m., Alabama time, they had rendezvoused at the Rankin Hotel located at the river's edge. In a mezzanine room, men checked their guns, maps, and papers. ..One group also commandeered a telephone booth on the hotel's second floor.

As the Girard town clock struck eight times, the Montgomery lawmen quickened their pace across the two bridges connecting Alabama and Georgia...the aroma of whiskey was so pervasive that the special deputies could smell the locations of liquor from the streets.

Liquor was found in wells, open fields, high bushes, tall grass, potato patches, an abandoned church, and an outhouse...

Accompanied by assistant Morris Allen, Black arrived late at Seale, a community the size of Ashland where the Russell County courthouse stood on a commanding hill overlooking the railroad station.

That night in Seale, Black dined with Fritz Thompson and Morris Allen. By 9:00 p.m., Black had a plan... Black and his old classmate retired to Hugo's room in the Dudley Hotel where Black drafted a motion. "Comes the State of Alabama by Hugo L. Black..."

... the seized liquor had totaled 1,000 cases, 37 barrels, 5 drums, 110 loose gallons, 1,300 quarts, as well as 2,591 loose pints. The liquor of all six clients probably represented more than half of Girard's entire seized whiskey, beer, and wine, a fabulous supply ...

Within the hour, the state's lawyers and the sheriff gathered in front of the first stack of liquor for photographs by newspapermen. Black stood in the middle between Logan Martin and the sheriff ...Logan Martin destroyed a bottle of whiskey with exaggerated style, and then it was Black's turn. "Black was on the job for some time," noted one reporter. "His specialty was cracking E. W. Harper. He had a good swing, and seemed to understand what he was about."

Black's... furnished apartment on the seventh floor of the new Ridgely was conveniently within six blocks of his office... It was an existence reproducing the scale of daily living that Black had sustained since his boyhood when he seldom went beyond sight of Ashland's county courthouse.

Louis Walton's death shocked the city...Walton's homemade bomb killed four people and injured dozens when it exploded in his face in the men's room of a smoker car, minutes before the train arrived at the Birmingham terminal... Walton's death was declared a suicide by a coroner's jury. Walton's friends, however, told a different story: a decent man was driven to a desperate, dishonorable end by Black's senseless prosecution.