Julius Chambers

Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers(1936–2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the1960s and 1970s as the nation’s leading African American civil rights attorney.Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers workedto advance the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s strategic litigation campaignfor civil rights, ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregationcases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Undaunted by the dynamiting ofhis home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his small integrated lawpractice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its highwater mark.

In this biography, Richard A. Rosen and Joseph Mosnier connect thedetails of Chambers’s life to the wider struggle to secure racial equalitythrough the development of modern civil rights law. Tracing his path froma dilapidated black elementary school to counsel’s lectern at the SupremeCourt and beyond, they reveal Chambers’s singular influence on the evolutionof federal civil rights law after 1964.