This compelling and compassionate film follows Pulitzer Prize nominee Claudia Johnson's nineteen year quest to penetrate the mysterious silence surrounding the story of Ruby McCollum, well educated wife of numbers racketeer "Bolita" Sam and the richest African-American woman in Live Oak, Florida, convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to the electric chair for the 1952 murder of her white doctor and alleged lover, state senator elect LeRoy Adams. News of the interracial murder shocked the nation, the state, and the region, escalating racial tension in Live Oak that remains to this day, almost sixty years later. It's still an unbelievably controversial hot topic in town, Johnson says in the film's opening. This story they do not want told. In spite of warnings there will be repercussions -- and a terrifying death threat -- she believes Ruby's story has to be told because she's discovered startling new information that Live Oak's corrupt white power structure has been covering up since 1952. A nationally recognized advocate for free speech, Johnson connects deeply to Ruby's story in 1991 when she discovers that the white power structure silenced Ruby, on the stand and to the press. Zora Neale Hurston, who covered the notoriously unfair trial, concluded that the truth lay on the other side of silence. Johnson wants to know why Ruby was silenced and why she killed LeRoy Adams. She didn't, as Johnson comes to believe when two courageous African Americans risk everything and break their long silence.
