While bus boycotts, sit-ins, and other acts of civil disobedience were the engine of the civil rights movement, the law was a primary context. Lawyers played a key role during the profound social upheavals, and the twenty-six contributors to this volume reveal what it was like to be a southern civil rights lawyer in this era.

These eyewitness accounts provide unique windows onto the most dramatic moments in civil rights history, illuminating the legal fights that heralded the 1965 Selma March, the first civil judgment against the Ku Klux Klan, the creation of ballot access for blacks in Alabama, and the 1968 Democratic Convention. White and black, male and female, Northern- and Southern-born, these lawyers discuss both the abuses they endured and the barriers they broke as they helped shape a critical chapter of American history.