Based on actual characters and events, the screenplay by Leslie Lee, from a story by producer Elsa Rassbach, follows the journey of Frank Custer (Damien Leake), a young black sharecropper from Mississippi who, in the aftermath of World War I, travels to Chicago for a job on the "killing floor" of a meatpacking plant and the promise of greater racial equity in the industrial North. There, he must navigate the seething ethnic and class conflicts-stoked by management and culminating in the Chicago race riot of 1919-as he attempts to unite his fellow workers in a fight for fair treatment.—Criterion