In 1891 the lynching of eleven Italians at New Orleans gave rise to grave difficulties involving Italy, the United States, and the state of Louisiana.
Cooper Hawkes (Rodney Rowland) is an in-vitro, sentenced by a judge to the Marines for defending himself from an attempted lynching.
At the first conference of the NAACP she successfully persuaded the organization to resolve to make lynching a federal crime.
The county in which the crime occurs is, without regard to the conduct of the officers, liable in damages of not less than $2000 to the legal representative of the person lynched; the county is authorized, however, to recover this amount from the persons engaged in the lynching.
The newspaper won its first of many Pulitzer Prizes in 1934 for a story that reporter Royce Brier wrote on the lynching deaths of two alleged San Jose kidnappers.