Black & African American, Lawyers & Judges, Civil Rights, Legal History, Religion & Spirituality, African-American Studies, Christianity, Law, Social Sciences, Thurgood Marshall, Marshall, Biography 

"From the 1930s to the early 1960s civil rights law was made primarily through constitutional litigation. Before Rosa Parks could ignite a Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Supreme Court had to strike down the Alabama law which made segregated bus service required by law; before Martin Luther King could march on Selma to register voters, the Supreme Court had to find unconstitutional the Southern Democratic Party's exclusion of African-Americans; and before the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court had to strike down the laws allowing for the segregation of public graduate schools, colleges, high schools, and grade schools." - Voila 

Content:
Prologue: "You'll Never Find a Better Constitution" 3 -- 1. Setting the Stage: Baltimore and the NAACP 6 -- 2. "No Star Performance": The Office in the 1940s 20 -- 3. "You Did All You Could ... ": Routine Work in the 1940s 42 -- 4. "A Negro on Trial for His Life": Criminal Law and Race Discrimination 56 -- 5. The "Increasing Power" of Private Discrimination 67 -- 6. "A Carefully Planned Program": Attacking Restrictive Covenants 81 -- 7. "Interference with the Effective Choice of the Voters": Challenging the White Primary 99 -- 8. "Passing Through a Transition": Education Cases, 1939-1945 116 -- 9. To "Determine the Future Course of Litigation": Making the Record on Segregated Universities 126 -- 10. "Replete with Road Markings": The Supreme Court Deals with Segregated Universities 137 -- 11. "A Direct Challenge of the Segregation Statutes": Making the Record in Brown 150 -- 12. "Behind This Are Certain Facts of Life": The Law in Brown 168 -- 13. "Boldness Is Essential But Wisdom Indispensable": Inside the Supreme Court 187 -- 14. "Quietly Ignoring Facts": Examining History 196 -- 15. "When They Produce Reasons for Delay": Devising the Remedy 217 -- 16. To "Open the Doors of All Schools": Passive Resistance to Brown, 1955-1961 232 -- 17. "Civil Rights ... Civil Wrongs": Massive Resistance to Brown, 1955-1961 247 -- 18. The "Battle Between the Sovereigns": Violent Resistance to Brown, 1955-1961 257 -- 19. "An Act to Make It Difficult ... to Assert the Constitutional Rights of Negroes": The Attack on the Lawyers, 1955-1961 272 -- 20. "A Mortal Blow from Which They Will Never Recover": The Attack on the NAACP, 1955-1961 283 -- 21. "I'd Kind of Outlived My Usefulness": The Changing Context of Civil Rights Litigation 301 -- Epilogue: "Power, not Reason" 314. 

Includes bibliographical references (pages 317-380) and index.