The true crime story that shook the foundations of the Segregationist South!

Ruby McCollum, a wealthy African-American wife, finds herself pregnant a second time by her white physician and senator-elect lover. Torn between her husband, who threatens to shoot her if she has another white baby, and her lover, who threatens to shoot her if she aborts his child, Ruby chooses to murder her lover.

Zora Neale Hurston, famous writer of the Harlem Renaissance who covered the case for The Pittsburgh Courier, pointed out that the trial marked the first time in history that "Paramour Rights"--the unwritten antebellum law giving a white man the right to a "Negro" woman whether she was married or not--was called into question by the testimony of Ruby McCollum.