The setting is 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, the "meanest city in the South." Martin Luther King, Jr., has come to town to confront segregation in the person of Bull Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety. Chris Wright, young, white, penniless and idealistic, arrives by Greyhound bus, anxious to join King in the fight. He is taken in by a charismatic local civil rights leader and put to work for the protest movement. There he meets Dorcas Jones, young, black, cynical and committed. Their ideals clash, but events bind the two close together as they follow King to the apocalyptic encounter between Birmingham's black children and the dogs and fire hoses of the Birmingham white establishment.