In one of the last incidents of the so-called "race riot era," thousands of white men, women and children besieged, burned, dynamited, [acetylene-] torched and destroyed the stately Grayson County (Texas) Courthouse, to get at a confessed black rapist on trial inside. The mob drove off Texas Rangers and National Guards, then went on to terrorize the town of Sherman's black community and torch the black business district. African-Americans, scholars and citizens alike still struggle to understand why it happened. But one immediate result was the formation of the pivotal Association of Southern [White] Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Based on extraordinary eyewitness oral history interviews by locally-based history professor Donna Kumler and others, this powerful, music-rich 29-minute documentary explores attitudes towards racial violence; mob-rule and mass-psychology; early racist-, feminist-, and pro-civil rights organizations and activities; race and gender relations; faith, endurance, and fate.

In one of the last incidents of the so-called "race riot era," thousands of white men, women and children besieged, burned, dynamited, [acetylene-] torched and destroyed the stately Grayson County (Texas) Courthouse, to get at a confessed black rapist on trial inside. The mob drove off Texas Rangers and National Guards, then went on to terrorize the town of Sherman's black community and torch the black business district. African-Americans, scholars and citizens alike still struggle to understand why it happened. But one immediate result was the formation of the pivotal Association of Southern [White] Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Based on extraordinary eyewitness oral history interviews by locally-based history professor Donna Kumler and others, this powerful, music-rich 29-minute documentary explores attitudes towards racial violence; mob-rule and mass-psychology; early racist-, feminist-, and pro-civil rights organizations and activities; race and gender relations; faith, endurance, and fate.