Based on the bestselling book, The Watsons Go to Birmingham, the film chronicles the ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African American family living in Flint, Michigan, and how they are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.

Briars in the Cotton Patch tells the nearly forgotten story of Koinonia Farm, a small Christian community in Southwest Georgia where whites and blacks chose to live and work together as equals despite the brutal and frightening consequences in the years leading up to the tumultuous Civil Rights era.