An aspiring young New York journalist is assigned by his editor at Life Magazine to travel to a small Alabama town-an assignment Richard Curtis resists with all his might-to look into the events surrounding the arrest and conviction of a county sheriff who was charged with aiding and abetting a mob of alleged members of the Ku Klux Klan in the flogging of several Negroes in the early 1950s. Elevating the story to national level is the suspicion that...