A schoolteacher at a newly desegregated Southern school agonizes over whether to turn a Black student in for the murder of a white boy in an alley fight, in order to prevent a white mob from murdering the student's friends and family. The Black student explains he didn't commit the murder and only acted in self-defense, but he insists on turning himself in to protect his neighborhood.

When the decision to build a new integrated school falls into the hands of an elderly woman, a small Tennessee town grows desperate to escape the control of her family, which has historically worked to prohibit progress and change.