Standing Up For Justice is about a fourteen-year-old boy who had come from Chicago to Mississippi to visit an uncle in 1955. After making a pass at a white woman, the black youth was brutally beaten, then shot. His murder and subsequent trial tell the story of how African American witnesses were courageous enough to tell the truth about what they knew of the kidnapping and killing. The murder trial also graphically exposes the ugly horrors of racism in the South.