Douglas Turner Ward

To protect his wife's "secret", a small-town Southern lawyer in the 1960s decides to defend a young man accused of murder, all while running for Congress and encountering personal threats to his family.

A multigenerational story of the lives of several black women who call an inner-city tenement home.

This film adaptation of James Baldwin's celebrated novel tells the journey of a family from the rural South to "big city" Harlem seeking both salvation and understanding and of a young boy struggling to earn the approval of a self-righteous and often unloving stepfather.

Russell B. Parker, a former vaudeville hoofer, is a man of big dreams but small ambitions. He hardly works at all in fact, often spending the time incessantly playing checkers with his friend, William Jenkins. Parker lives with Theopolis and Bobby, his two unemployed sons, and Adele, his hard-working daughter. The ghost of his dead wife, a woman who drove herself into an early grave working to support the family, nags at his conscience.

At the beginning of the 19th century a man and his son settle in Arizona which used to be a frontier state and full of criminals at that time.