It is 1943 and World War II is at its height, raging on battlefields across the globe. A bloody, divisive war is also raging on America’s home front, as stepped-up wartime production lures legions of poor blacks from the rural South to defense jobs in the North.

The wartime migration has a profound impact on America, unmasking underlying animosities and transforming industrial centers into both “Arsenals for Democracy” and cauldrons of racial conflict, as whites attempt to impose long-held racial barriers, and blacks—believing they are heading to a promised land of opportunity—battle a northern bigotry every bit as powerful as that of the Jim Crow South.

Set against this backdrop, Blood in the Promised Land chronicles the separate journeys of two men—one a young black migrant who flees the South to work in Pittsburgh’s booming steel industry, the other a Jewish physician forced to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. Each has been scarred by harrowing pasts shaped largely by his racial or ethnic identity; each seeks to rebuild his life, searching for an America struggling to fulfill its own promise, home and abroad. When their paths unwittingly cross during a violent racial conflict, their fateful encounter instantly reshapes their lives, permitting them to transcend their differences and exorcise the ghosts of their pasts. Their unlikely bond also thrusts them into the crucible of the civil rights movement, as they courageously join forces in an effort to crush a terrorist hate group.