In the early 1920s the Greenwood District in Tulsa Oklahoma is the wealthiest Black community in the United States. But Tulsa is still a segregated city. Black Wall Street and white Tulsa are very much divided. Twelve-year-old Lena knows this but she feels safe and sheltered from the racism in her successful flourishing neighborhood. That all changes when Dick Rowland a young Black man from Greenwood is accused of assaulting a white woman. Racial tensions boil over. Mobs of white citizens attack Greenwood terrorizing Black residents and businesses and forcing many--including Lena and her family--to flee. Now Lena must help her family survive one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history.