At the Whitelaw Hotel in Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune takes tea from Shirley, a young attendant who brings the Washington Post and the Pittsburgh Courier and asks for an autograph for her mother. Mary notes the progress embodied by the Black-owned hotel and recalls earlier segregation that barred her from such accommodations. She reflects on her recent appearance at a White House conference with President Hoover, where her appeal about the dire conditions facing Black children met polite indifference.

Reading the Washington Post, Mary takes in worsening economic news before a small headline seizes her attention: Southern women, led by Jessie Daniel Ames, have convened to confront lynching. The article’s stark statistics and its declaration that silence equals complicity strike Mary deeply, presenting an unexpected alignment of white women against racial terror.

The proclamation unlocks a searing memory from Mary’s childhood: at a mule auction, a confrontation leads a white mob to seize Mr. Lewis, her father Samuel’s friend. Her father flees with Mary, and that night the family keeps vigil, fearing retaliation. In hushed grief, they accept that Mr. Lewis was likely lynched; by morning, it is confirmed. The scene fixes Mary’s first intimate knowledge of lynching and her father’s anguish at his helplessness.

Back in the present, Mary weighs whether a group of white women can effect change, yet sees potential power if paired with a political ally. She resolves to speak with Eleanor Roosevelt that very day, hoping to harness Eleanor’s influence as a governor’s wife toward the cause of combating lynching.