In 1966, more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Alabama’s public education system was still so thoroughly segregated that only 2.4 percent of its Black students attended formerly all-white schools. Four years later, the share of Black children in majority white schools had risen to 36.5 percent, a level of integration higher than that of almost every other state in the nation. Behind that dramatic transformation lay Lee v. Macon County Board of Education, the federal court case at the center of Landsberg’s fine new book.
Lee started in January 1963, when sixteen Black students in Tuskegee, Alabama, filed a class-action suit against their school board for maintaining a segregated school system in defiance of Brown. Landsberg joined the case three years later, as a trial attorney with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. He stayed with it,...