With Love From Harlem

In March 1943, 22-year-old jazz pianist Hazel Scott performs a triumphant return at Cafe Society, the only integrated nightclub in New York City. Known for blending classical compositions with jazz improvisation, Hazel commands a packed house. She notices Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Harlem's city councilman, watching her intently from a front table, his wife Isabel beside him. After the show, Adam asks for an interview for his newspaper, The People's Voice, but Hazel deflects, aware he is married. Backstage, her mother and sole music teacher, Alma Long Scott, a Trinidadian émigré, praises the performance. Billie Holiday, Hazel's self-declared big sister, stumbles in visibly intoxicated. Alma warns Hazel that tying herself to Billie's troubles could derail her career.

Hazel has recently moved with Alma into a house in White Plains, New York. Her longtime boyfriend, Lee, helps with the move, but Hazel finds him intellectually unstimulating. When Barney Josephson, Cafe Society's owner and a father figure to Hazel, arrives with two film contracts offering equal pay with white counterparts, Hazel signs immediately. Adam soon announces his run for Congress on television. Barney notes Adam's interest, but Hazel insists she has no room for a married man.

At a Harlem community forum, Hazel watches Adam argue passionately for racial solidarity and agrees to a dinner interview. They bond over music, literature, and politics. Adam admits his marriage to Isabel Washington, a former Broadway star who sacrificed her career for him, is effectively over. Hazel insists her career comes first, but the connection is undeniable.

In Hollywood, while filming The Heat's On, Hazel halts production for three days, refusing to perform until dirty aprons smeared on Negro actresses' costumes are removed. The studio capitulates, but Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn threatens to blacklist her. When the 1943 Harlem riot erupts after a soldier is shot at the Braddock Hotel, Adam delivers a galvanizing speech at Abyssinian Baptist Church, his congregation, framing the violence as a reckoning against poverty and injustice. Hazel resolves to help his congressional campaign.

She volunteers alongside her friend Josephine Cogdell Schuyler, a white Southern woman married to journalist George Schuyler. At an event hosted by Alpha Phi Alpha, a historically Black fraternity, in December 1943, Hazel and Adam share intimate confessions about loss and sleep together for the first time. Hazel breaks things off with Lee.

Adam moves out of his home with Isabel, but Isabel refuses to grant a divorce. When the affair makes headlines, Alma demands Adam do things properly. He announces the relationship publicly at Abyssinian and promises to marry Hazel after winning his race.

Adam wins the race. Hazel accompanies him to Washington for his January 1945 swearing-in as Harlem's first Negro congressman, enduring racist slurs in a Capitol elevator. Adam proposes in French, and Hazel accepts. When composer Richard Rodgers offers her the lead in the Broadway musical Carousel, debuting days before the wedding, Hazel accepts without consulting Adam, sparking their first major conflict. He attends opening night and apologizes. The wedding proceeds at Bethel AME Church in August 1945, followed by a reception for over 4,000 guests.

Tensions mount quickly. Hazel discovers Adam's secretary, Hattie Freeman, living in his Washington apartment. Church members treat Hazel as an outsider. Adam pressures her to leave the nightclub circuit, and Hazel reluctantly agrees. He then arranges, without her consent, a solo appearance at Constitution Hall, the venue owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) that rejected singer Marian Anderson in 1939. The DAR withdraws the invitation upon learning Hazel is Negro, and Adam publicly attacks First Lady Bess Truman for refusing to condemn the decision. Hazel tours the country speaking out against the injustice and discovers she is pregnant.

Alma dies of viral pneumonia at 46, plunging Hazel into paralyzing grief. Josephine urges her not to lose the living while mourning the dead. In July 1946, Hazel gives birth to a son, Adam Clayton Powell III, called Skipper. Motherhood is consuming, and Josephine later warns Hazel she is disappearing into Adam's orbit.

When federal agents arrest Billie at the Hotel Grampion in Philadelphia on narcotics charges, Hazel tries to intervene, but Adam refuses to help. Billie pleads guilty and receives a sentence of a year and a day. On the way to Hazel's comeback concert, Adam suffers a severe heart attack. Hazel's agent, Isa Kloukowsky, secures a residency in Trinidad, Hazel's birthplace. Adam encourages her to go but backs out himself. In Trinidad, Hazel's great-aunt Maud asks whether she would rather have the world's applause or her son seeing her in the crowd.

After Billie's release, Hazel fulfills a childhood dream by performing with the New York Philharmonic. When Adam sees Hazel with Lee at a family dinner after the concert, his jealousy ignites months of fighting. A Carnegie Hall concert Adam arranges temporarily restores their rhythm.

In 1949, Isa secures Hazel a deal with the DuMont Television Network, making her the first Negro woman to host her own TV show. The Hazel Scott Show gains a national audience, but when the publication Red Channels names her as a Communist sympathizer during the McCarthy era, a period of political persecution targeting suspected leftists, sponsors flee. Hazel testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), delivering a forceful statement dismantling the accusations, but DuMont cancels the show. Barney, whose venues come under investigation after Hazel mentioned his name during testimony, severs their relationship.

Billie takes Hazel to a Greenwich Village club, where they find Adam with another woman. When Isa calls with an offer for a Paris engagement, Hazel immediately accepts.

What begins as a three-week trip stretches into seven years. In Paris, Hazel rebuilds her life, raising Skipper and performing freely. She begins an affair with Quincy Jones, a young American producer, but the relationship shatters when a magazine reveals Quincy bragged about it and is himself married. Adam arrives asking for another chance. Skipper begs Hazel to let his father stay, and she relents, but Adam's old behavior quickly resurfaces.

Hazel spirals into a breakdown and overdoses on pills. Pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital, she is revived by a doctor. Mrs. Hughes, Skipper's nanny, reveals Adam tried to have the death certificate falsified. Back in Mount Vernon, New York, Hazel is subjected to electroshock therapy without informed consent. When Skipper visits and calls her "Mommy" for the first time in years, Hazel fires the doctor and begins reclaiming her strength.

She tends to Billie in her final days at Metropolitan Hospital, demanding police remove the handcuffs chaining her dying friend to the bed. Nearly a year after Billie's death, Hazel returns to performing and secures her divorce from Adam, asking for no alimony, only full custody of Skipper.

While watching Adam announce his remarriage on television, Hazel finds a letter from the DAR apologizing for the 1945 rejection and inviting her to perform at Constitution Hall. On the night of the concert, Nina Simone, whom Hazel met at Cafe Society in 1943, opens the show. Hazel takes the stage before a packed, integrated audience and receives a thunderous standing ovation, locking eyes with Skipper, whose face glows with pride. She has reclaimed her stage, her legacy, and her power.