Julius Chambers was an extraordinary man. Born in Depression-era rural North Carolina to struggling but striving parents and hemmed in by American apartheid, also known as legal segregation, Chambers nevertheless wrung the most from an inferior and inadequate Jim Crow public education. The idea of becoming an attorney germinated in 1950 when his father, a highly skilled automobile mechanic who owned his own garage, was stiffed by a white customer on a large repair bill. No white attorney would assist him – and there were no black lawyers in or near the family's hometown of Mt. Gilead. His parents had planned on sending him to a boarding prep school for blacks fifty miles distant but now were unable, and Chambers felt the sting of both his deprivation and his father's humiliation. Instead, he completed his public education at Montgomery County's dilapidated Jim Crow high school. Ill-prepared for college – his score on the standardized entry tests of the day could hardly have been lower had he simply signed in and left the multiple-choice answer sheet blank – discerning admission officers nevertheless identified something special in him. He enrolled in and excelled at the under-supported North Carolina College for Negroes (where he was the valedictorian), earned a master's degree in history at the University of Michigan, and enrolled in the University of North Carolina law school (where he was the first black editor of the law review and graduated in 1962 at the top of his class). After earning an advanced degree in 1964 from the Columbia University law school but receiving no job offers from (and precious few interviews with) white-shoe firms or a coveted clerkship for a federal judge, Chambers joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund. That same year Chambers returned to North Carolina, establishing an integrated law firm in Charlotte, and in a few years developed a docket of legal cases, victories in which over the succeeding decade were essential to the dismantling of legal segregation and racial disability in the areas of public accommodations, public education, and employment.

Three large points stand out in this excellent biography by Richard Rosena and Joseph Mosnier. First, Chambers's education and legal preparation are thoroughly imbricated with the history of Jim Crow and the legal fight against it; Julius Chambers, following the best traditions of Richard Kluger's Simple Justice (1975) and Genna Rae McNeil's Groundwork (1984), contextualizes compelling biography with a primer in civil rights legal strategy and struggle.

Second, Julius Chambers cuts against the periodization inherent in much black freedom-struggle historiography, which often emphasizes a receding importance of the legal struggle vis-à-vis mass nonviolent direct action and, after 1966, black power. While many histories of the period assume that the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked the demise of legal segregation, enforcement of the laws, and, in many instances, defining precisely what the laws precluded and allowed required strenuous effort. Through Julius Chambers's efforts, North Carolina became a leader in the legal efforts to scrap Jim Crow. The cases he pursued and won before the US Supreme Court upended the segregated racial regime. Wooten v. Moore foreclosed businesses in public accommodations from refusing service to blacks; Swann v. Mecklenburg ordered the public schools to take every necessary step to eliminate immediately all vestiges of racially identified schools; Griggs v. Duke Power ruled against companies’ hiring and promotion practices (often with at least tacit consent from unions that were, as historian Herbert Hill wrote, “white job trusts”) that had a “disparate impact” on black workers.Footnote ¹ Legal challenges were lengthy, time-consuming, and expensive, but the Chambers law firm pursued them without regard to clients’ ability to pay. Complicating the cases were often opposing attorneys and their clients who delayed and ignored lawful orders, judges who were hostile to desegregation, and, on more than one occasion, unethical and unlawful collusion between a judge and an attorney representing Chambers's adversary. Chambers privileged legal action to compel desegregation even when groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panthers, the Youth Organization for Black Unity, and other radical formations had abandoned both integrationism and legal action. Julius Chambers makes a convincing case that he was not wrong to do so, for even after the legislative victories of the mid-1960s, there were still more grapes to be stamped in the vineyards of the courts.

Third, the book situates Chambers's work in the full range of civil rights activities. Chambers saw legal work as foundational, but he did not insist his clients conform to his views of the ways to make change. He was catholic in his view of strategy and tactics and thoroughly embraced his role of supporting all those who were striving to overturn the Jim Crow order. He and his firm not only brought the above-named suits that broke constitutional grounds, they also zealously defended jailed civil rights protesters and criminal defendants who were snared in the legal machinery. And while Chambers and his colleagues may have had opinions about the efficacy of their clients’ actions in affecting change, they understood their role as being to support their freedom efforts, not dictate their actions.

In the decades since Chambers's major Supreme Court victories, retrenchment has been the marching order of the US ruling class, though there has not been a return to legal segregation. This is a point that Rosen and Mosnier drive home in the concluding chapters and epilogue. Julius Chambers succeeds because it delineates the thought and action of a monumental legal mind and is a cautionary tale. The struggle for equality and against exploitation requires the full measure of creativity, intellectual and forensic acumen, and single-minded devotion such as Julius Chambers offered. But given how elastic the ruling elite and the system have proven to be – they managed to adjust to the overthrow of Jim Crow and maintain their dominance over the economy and society – the legal struggle, while crucial, must work cooperatively and supportively with actors who champion other forms of struggle.