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A Supreme Court historian’s memoir places court events in the larger context of American history.

Legal scholar James F. Simon has written many acclaimed books on the history of the US Supreme Court, but in this memoir, he turns his attention to a more personal subject: himself. Simon, a native of Fort Worth, details what it was like growing up in segregated Texas. He left home for college and law school at Yale, interspersed with travels abroad to build a schoolhouse in Ghana, work at an Israeli kibbutz, and spend a year on a fellowship in India.

Simon worked as a legal journalist for Time magazine before embarking on a career as a Supreme Court historian. He later was appointed professor of constitutional law and served as dean of New York Law School. Meanwhile, he continued his work on what became his specialty, well-researched books on the history of the Supreme Court that place events at the court in the larger context of American history. Much of this research is included in his papers, which are now housed at the Briscoe Center for American History.

In this engaging memoir, Simon describes the challenges of interviewing Supreme Court justices and researching constitutional history for his books and juggling his law school and family responsibilities, all the while reflecting on changing American perspectives on civil rights and liberties.

What Brown did was to elevate race from the country's dirty secret to its most urgent topic of conversation. This book stands alone in presenting, in one source, stories of black and white Americans, men and women, from all parts of the nation, who were public school students during the years immediately after Brown. All shared an epiphany. Some became aware of race and the burden of racial separation. Others dared to hope that the yoke of racial oppression would at last be lifted.

The editors surveyed 4750 law professors born between 1936 and 1954, received 1000 responses, and derived these forty essays from those willing to write personal accounts of their childhood experiences in the classroom and in their communities. Their moving stories of how Brown affected them say much about race relations then and now. They also provide a picture of how social change can shape the careers of an entire generation in one profession.

Contributors provide accounts from across the nation. Represented are
-de jure states, those segregated by law at the time of Brown, including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, as well as the District of Columbia
-de facto states, those where segregation was illegal but a common practice, including California, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Washington, and Wisconsin.