Intruder in the Dust

In a highly racialized southern American town, white teenage Chick Mallison doesn't much like that he has been considered a friend to older black Lucas Beauchamp, ever since he met Lucas when Lucas helped him after falling into a creek on Lucas' property. Deep in his heart, Chick does consider him a friend and a good man. Many of the white people in town don't much like Lucas in he not being subservient to white people in general. But when Lucas is charged with shooting white Vinson Gowrie to death in the back, Lucas caught standing over Vinson's body and there having been a recent public altercation between the two, that vitriol against Lucas reaches new heights, Sheriff Hampton needing to add extra security at the jailhouse to protect Lucas with many of the white townsfolk wanting to lynch Lucas. But as Lucas asks Chick to ask his uncle, attorney John Gavin Stevens, to represent him, which Stevens does do, Lucas confides not in Stevens, who like everyone else believes Lucas guilty, but in Chick in telling him of his innocence. While not seeing the shooter and thus not directly pointing the finger at any one person in not wanting to convict someone else without conclusive evidence, Lucas does strongly suspect someone and points Chick in the direction on proving his innocence which would require the dangerous move of digging up Vinson's buried body. Chick, with his black friend Aleck and seventy year old white Miss Eunice Habersham, by his side, they also believing in Lucas' innocence, they go on that dangerous mission with most of the angry white townsfolk against them if they knew what they were doing.