Storyline This entry in Paramount's "Headliner" series of musical shorts headlines
Cab Calloway and his Orchestra. They do some numbers at
Harlem's "Cotton Club" and following the show, they go over to a Harlem
rendezvous and shimmy at a jitterbug party. Cameo appearance of Lena Horne and Ethel Moses.
Storyline Rural Mississippi in the 1940s: Lucas Beauchamp, a local black man with a
reputation of not kowtowing to whites, is found standing over the body
of a dead white man, holding a pistol that has recently been fired.
Quickly arrested for murder and jailed, Beauchamp insists he's innocent
and asks the town's most prominent lawyer, Gavin Stevens, to defend him,
but Stevens refuses. When a local boy whom Beauchamp has helped in the
past and who believes him to be innocent hears talk of a mob taking
Beauchamp out of jail and lynching him, he pleads with Stevens to defend
Beauchamp at trial and prove his innocence.