It is 1925. Ossian Cain-a widowed black doctor with a teen daughter, a new wife and baby, and a dentist brother-buys a home in a white neighborhood in a northern industrial city. On their second night, the Cains are threatened by a mob that calls for lynching and hurls rocks through their windows. During the confrontation, a white man is shot dead. The entire family is arrested and charged with first degree murder. Summoned by the local NAACP, legal legend Charles Durham, defender of the damned, comes to town to try to keep the Cains out of the electric chair. Like Inherit the Wind, The Mark of Cain is a courtroom drama with one foot in the history that inspired it and the other in the turbulent time in which it was born.