Unscrupulously ambitious, Brutus Jones escapes from jail after killing a guard and, through bluff and bravado, finds himself the emperor of a Caribbean island.
A struggling widow and her daughter take in a black housekeeper and her fair-skinned daughter. The two women start a successful business but face familial, identity, and racial issues along the way.
Duke Ellington plays hot jazz in a fictional story that finds him down on his luck; he tries in vain to dissuade his friend, dancer Fredi Washington, from working with heart trouble even though it means work for his band. Sure enough, she collapses on stage...
A female journalist travels to a new neighborhood after getting a (false) lead and is surprised by what she finds.
The well-known explorer and hunter Captain Spaulding has just returned from Africa, and is being welcomed home with a lavish party at the estate of influential society matron Mrs. Rittenhouse when a valuable painting goes missing. The intrepid Captain Spaulding attempts to solve the crime with the help of his silly secretary Horatio Jamison, while sparring with the anarchic Signor Emanuel Ravelli and his nutty sidekick The Professor.
A well-respected boxer is framed by his enemies in the death of a policeman during a raid on a local gambling establishment. He is convicted and sentenced to death and his friends seek to find the real murderer.
In Haiti, a black female plantation owner enacts a voodoo curse, and revives zombies for revenge on a white male neighbor, who has chosen a white woman over her for marriage.
A plantation owner's wife goes on trial for shooting a man she says attacked her, but a handwritten letter reveals otherwise.
In this short film, musical and dance acts perform, first at a night club, then at a "rent party".
Ossie Davis narrates a history of "race films," films made before 1950 which catered to a primarily black audience.
This jazz musical short has a comedy plot about marital infidelity. Bandleader Cab Calloway plays a ladies man who dates the wife (Fredi Washington) of a train porter who is frequently absent from home. Calloway and his Orchestra perform "Zaz-zuh-zaz" and "The Lady with the Fan" at the Cotton Club in Harlem.