"The city of Wells lay inert, hot and stagnant... The heat of the Carolinas in August hung thick and heavy in the air." (Pg. 1) In the Heat of the Night is set in a summer in the 1960s, in Wells, South Carolina. In the 1960s, racism and prejudice were all over the south. In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous speech "I Have a Dream" to a large group of civil rights marchers.