In the days of the pioneers and the Oregon Trail, families from the East traveled into the great frontier of the American west, unsure of what lay ahead of them. For many, their last place of rest and preparation before the venture was in a blooming town on the Missouri River. This is the city of Omaha, Nebraska, the Gateway to the West.

Omaha is the second-largest city on the Great Plains today, home to over 300,000 people and swiftly rising. The imposing brick silhouettes of Jobbers Canyon form the heart of the burgeoning meatpacking and agricultural industry which dominates the local economy, while the golden fields of the Big O's surroundings are filled with wheat, corn, and other grains. Just a few miles south is the University of Nebraska, the largest college in the state and home to a resurgent Cornhuskers football team. When the sun sets on the prairie, you can count on the theaters and venues of the city's North Side to spill jazz and blues into the streets, the rich music developed by the sizeable Black population which calls Omaha their home.

But just as anvil clouds on the horizon signal incoming thunderstorms, so too does trouble creep towards the city. Rumors of railroad and meatpacking industry restructures threaten a massive wave of layoffs among the impoverished North Side, predominantly targeting Black laborers. While Nebraska has no segregation nor slaver history on the books, the city is governed unofficially by an everpresent policy of redlining and secret covenants keeping the communities apart, only recently even being challenged. Wealth disparity between White and Black citizens is among the highest in the nation. Tensions, always present and always bubbling, threaten to explode as the Civil Rights movement steams on - and, if the Red Summer of 1919 bears any relevance to today, an explosion means riots, lynchings, bloodshed, and death.

Omaha teeters on the precipice of the future - economically as precarious as Detroit or Toledo, racially as fragile as Birmingham or Montgomery. Its fate relies as much upon itself as it does on the nation around it. What way America falls may decide whether Omaha has summer days or tornado season ahead.