Three eighteen-year-old southerners start the day of March 25, 1961, not knowing that the events soon to occur in Scottsboro, Alabama will lead them and the South on an inexorable journey of change: Clarence Norris, black, is boarding a freight train as a hobo in Chattanooga; Waights Taylor, white, is a student at the University of Alabama; Rosa McCauley Parks, black, is a resident of Pine Level, Alabama.

"In 1966 in a small town in Louisiana, a 19-year-old black man named Gary Duncan pulled his car off the road to stop a fight. Duncan was arrested a few minutes later for the crime of putting his hand on the arm of a white child. Rather than accepting his fate, Duncan found Richard Sobol, a brilliant, 29-year-old lawyer from New York who was the only white attorney at "the most radical law firm" in New Orleans. Against them stood one of the most powerful...

The civil rights movement that looms over the 1950s and 1960s was the tip of an iceberg, the legal and political remnant of a broad, raucous, deeply American movement for social justice that flourished from the 1920s through the 1940s. This rich history of that early movement introduces us to a contentious mix of home-grown radicals, labor activists, newspaper editors, black workers, and intellectuals who employed every strategy imaginable to take...