City of Cousins

Will Barnes, a black field hand, dreams of leaving his meager life in Mississippi and moving to Omaha, Nebraska where his cousins live and where there are good jobs for Black people. But he is reluctant to leave the south until his friend Bobby is imprisoned for a Black Code violation which then motivates Will and his other friend Noble to move.

Will and Noble learn that Omaha has its own perils. It's a city in many ways as segregated as the south and the home of a racist racketeer named Tom Garrison. Garrison wants to have an honest mayor removed and replaced by someone who will let him wield his power freely. Through propagandist tactics to make the mayor look incompetent, Garrison and his minions create deep racial division in Omaha.

Will and Noble land good paying jobs at a meat company but the brutality of the work is more than they bargained for so they look for other work. Against Will's protest, Noble works for Garrison. Will gets a job as a porter with the railroad.

While working as a porter Will meets a white woman named Alice. The two develop an intimate relationship and over time Will thinks that Alice could be “the one”. What he doesn’t know is that Alice is engaged to a soldier named Robert who returns from WWI and gets a job as Garrison’s personal aide.

Eventually Robert catches Will and Alice together. He accuses Will of trying to rape her and Alice does not deny it. Robert reports this to Garrison who uses his influence at the local newspaper to manipulate the white people of Omaha into a mass frenzy of fear and hatred. Soon Will is brutally lynched by a mob of thousands in front of the city courthouse.