Nine Black teenagers riding a freight train through Alabama in March 1931 are pulled off in Scottsboro and accused of raping two white women who were also riding the rails. Within weeks, all but one are sentenced to death by all-white juries, despite one of the accusers, Ruby Bates, later recanting her testimony. The film traces the case through eight years and multiple retrials, as the Communist Party's International Labor Defense and the NAACP compete to represent the defendants, and as the convictions twice reach the Supreme Court, producing landmark rulings on the right to counsel and the exclusion of Black jurors. Archival photographs, newsreel footage, and interviews reconstruct how the case became a national and international cause, drawing protests as far away as Europe, while none of the nine were freed by the process that was supposed to exonerate them. The last defendant was not paroled until 1950, and the film treats that outcome as the real verdict on the Jim Crow legal system.