It is January of 1963 in a small town outside Savannah, Georgia. Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference presides over a strategy meeting of eleven activists, including Fred Shuttlesworth, Wyatt T. Walker, Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young. The goal is to join efforts with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, under the leadership of Shuttlesworth, to attack segregation in Birmingham. Wyatt Walker hands out a detailed blueprint of Project C- for “Confrontation”. The campaign's strategy is to put economic pressure on Birmingham's merchants, so organizers scheduled the protests to begin around the Easter season- the second biggest shopping period of the year. He spells out to the group the four stage plan;

1. Begin nightly mass meeting to build strength and support. Organize small-scale sit-ins to draw attention to our desegregation platform.
2. Organize a boycott of the downtown business section and begin slightly larger demonstrations.
3. Increase the pressure with mass marches to both enforce the boycott and to defy unjust segregation laws resulting in mass arrests.
4. If necessary, we will call on supporters outside of Birmingham to cripple the city under the combined pressure of publicity, economic boycott, and the burden of overflowing jails.

Walker explains that each stage must build upon the one before and that we must keep the momentum. Furthermore, we must be prepared to put a thousand or more in jail and keep each jailgoer inside for five or six days at a time. The plan requires extensive preparation, perfect timing and loads of money.