It's 1994 and Mississippi has still not ratified the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. In one week, Mississippians are poised to elect the corrupt ex-convict Reverend Leon Jackson as the first African American governor in state history. The reverend has organized the Apostles, composed of the country's two deadliest gangs, to employ the same violent tactics the Ku Klux Klan used in black polling areas during the Civil Rights Movement. Meanwhile, the other gubernatorial candidate and Klan-affiliated Congressman Quentin McDaniels pulls his eighteen-year-old son, Spencer, out of prep school back east. The Congressman enrolls Spencer in Jackson's most violent school to "reintegrate" and "desegregate" the now 98 percent African American based public school system. But his plan backfires. Spencer meets a young black woman from Oakland, California, who has also returned to Mississippi. The two fall in love, but not before sharing an abominable act of modern-day racism in the grocery of a Mississippi backwoods town. And by the end of the week, the Mississippi that burned in 1964 will burn again-blazing this time with more fury and hatred than ever before.