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Jim Crow and Me NewSouth Books When he began practicing in the 1950s in Montgomery, Alabama, Solomon Seay was one of the only seven black lawyers in the entire state. But the tiny band made up in courage, craftiness, and tenacity what it lacked in numbers, and soon the underpinnings of Jim Crow segregation began to fall. Seay grew up as the son of a schoolteacher mother and a father who was a legendary preacher of the liberation gospel—a man both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Seay’s eventual law partner, civil rights law icon Fred D. Gray, Sr., claimed as a mentor. Both of Seay’s parents stressed education and taught their children not to accept second-class status. Seay’s memoir takes a different tack from most civil rights legal autobiographies: in a series of compact, powerful vignettes, he reveals dramatic courtroom moments; the complex personalities of segregation’s victims, heroes, and oppressors; and the emotional highs and lows of using the law to seek justice where it too often had been an empty promise. Some of Seay’s scenes are heartrending in their depiction of suffering at the hands of evil and ignorance, others joyously affirming in their revelations of humanity and triumph. In crisp, often elegant prose, Seay paints pictures of a Southern way of life that thankfully has been dismantled, with much of the dismantling by his own hands.
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