In 1926, a USC football star investigates a lynching neither police nor major media will admit even happened.
As a young white boy, Tom Hickey had attended the mostly black Azusa Street Pentecostal church where Frank Gaines, a wise and gentle black man, often protected him from the abuses of his cruel mother. Twenty years later, while Tom is the leader of a dance orchestra, Frank is found hanging from a tree in Echo Park.
Aside from his grief, Tom becomes furious that neither the Times nor the Examiner covered the lynching, that the only report comes from the Forum, a weekly tabloid distributed in the city's black community.
Tom goes to his close friend Leo Weiss, a policeman, who at first tries to convince him the lynching was an unfounded rumor but later admits it happened but the police want no part of it. When Tom vows to investigate, Leo warns him against taking on an unbeatable opposing team. Not only will he face the famously corrupt police force whose chief, James Two-Gun Davis, partners with bootleggers yet prides himself on extra-judicial executions of both gangsters and union organizers, he also will collide with two of America's most powerful men and a woman whose influence rivals theirs.
Harry Chandler, boss of the Times, is the largest private landholder in the U.S. William Randolph Hearst publishes the Examiner and rules the country's most influential media empire. And, Leo contends, investigating will invite the wrath of fanatical devotees of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, whose radio ministry reaches millions, and who quite likely engineered the cover-up, since Frank was found hanging only yards from the main entrance to her church. Also, a lynching means the odds predict Tom's rushing headlong into the Ku Klux Klan, another big player in local politics.
Tom's conscience won't allow him to heed Leo's warnings, though without his friend's help, his only potential ally is his sister Florence, a wild flapper high school girl he has raised and supported since they fled, as an adolescent and a child, from their brutal mother. For her sake, he gave up college after two football seasons. Yet Florence appears more hindrance than help. Her latest fling is with an Examiner employee Tom believes is reporting to Hearst about him.
While facing the dangers of single-handedly challenging such a frightful team, he also gives up his orchestra when they are offered an out of town engagement and quits his day job after learning his employer belongs to the Klan. Only pawnshop debt allows him to feed himself and his beloved sister.
The search for truth gains urgency while Tom follows leads in the black community and connects with the publisher of the Forum, who clues him that black citizens mean to avenge the Frank Gaines lynching by an attack on a KKK meeting, which could easily prompt a race war. Aside from routine oppression and humiliation, the black community had recently been traumatized by the release of the D.W. Griffith film Birth of a Nation that portrayed Klansmen as heroes and by the Tulsa massacre and burning of Black Wall Street.
Besides, with the country hardly recovered from the first world war or the Spanish flu pandemic and now destabilized by the excesses of the Prohibition era, such a spark could set the city ablaze.
But an even graver challenge to Tom arises when friends of Frank Gaines reveal that Milly Hickey, mother of Tom and Florence, had once wanted Frank for her own, may have murdered Frank's lover out of jealousy, and may even be at the center of the intrigue that led to the lynching. And because Milly, a gifted seamstress, is a friend of Marion Davies,...
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