Justice You Shall Pursue

The civil rights movement transformed the American South in the 1960s, reshaping the region—and with it, the nation—into a more visibly democratic society. Yet the odds of dismantling legally enforced racial segregation were extraordinarily long. Among those who helped to shorten them were outside attorneys who came to the aid of activists on the ground. Northern lawyers freed protesters from jail, preserving their ability to continue the struggle, and carried civil rights cases to the highest levels of the federal judiciary. In so doing, these attorneys helped expand the constitutional meanings of "free expression," "freedom of assembly," "due process," and "equal protection of the laws."

At the height of the freedom struggle, most of these northern lawyers were Jewish. Their prominence reflected the near absence of Black attorneys—who made up barely one percent of the American bar in the early 1960s—and the reluctance of white Southern lawyers to challenge segregation through constitutional appeals. Until a generation of Black lawyers could fully join the battle, Jewish attorneys, who saw an opportunity to turn their professional skills toward the pursuit of justice, formed the legal backbone of the movement.

The activism of these lawyers has been understudied. Justice You Shall Pursue: Jewish Lawyers Against Jim Crow serves as a collective biography of the litigators who participated in the civil rights movement. The volume centers on the decade when landmark civil rights legislation was enacted, but its story stretches from the founding of the NAACP before the First World War to the political backlash that followed the Vietnam era. By that time, the regional fortresses of legalized segregation had collapsed, but the struggle for equality—and the lawyers who waged it—had already remade the nation.