Featuring an interracial cast, Within Our Gates follows a Southern black woman who, abandoned by her fiancé, travels to the North in search of funding for a black school in her home town, only to have her past come back to haunt her. The film explores racial tensions in the South through issues of miscegenation, rape, and, most controversially, lynching. Due to a particularly graphic lynching scene, Southern theatres would not book the film and it eventually disappeared for seventy years.