Perceptive writings and opinions of a powerful figure in twentieth-century civil rights legislation Federal Judge Frank M. Johnson of Alabama decided many of the most important civil rights and liberties cases in twentieth-century American history. During the 1950s and sixties, his decisions supported Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights fighters in their struggles for justice and equality. Johnson extended the Constitutional defense of individual rights for women, students, prisoners, mental health patients, poor criminal defendants, and voters during his active judicial career, which lasted until 1991. This collection assembles some of Johnson's most thought-provoking and insightful essays, many published as journal articles that explain and defend a number of his decisions. Also included in this volume is the first published transcript of a 1980 public television interview with Bill Moyers, in which Johnson personally explains his historic decisions. Meticulously detailed and documented, yet accessible to a wide range of readers, this book explores the constitutional ideals that Johnson forged and defended as he persistently overcame public officials' resistance to constitutional rights and social change.

Americans were riveted to their television sets in 1957, when a violent mob barred black students from entering Little Rock's Central High School and faced off against paratroopers sent by a reluctant President Eisenhower. That set off a firestorm of protest throughout the nation and ultimately led to the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Cooper v. Aaron, reaffirming Brown v. Board of Education's mandate for school integration "with all deliberate speed" and underscoring the supremacy of federal and constitutional authority over state law.

Noted scholar Tony Freyer, arguably our nation's top authority on this subject, now provides a concise, lucid, and eminently teachable summary of that historic case and shows that it paved the way for later civil rights victories. He chronicles how the Little Rock school board sought court approval to table integration efforts and how the black community brought suit against the board's watered-down version of compliance. The board's request was denied by a federal appeals court and taken to the Supreme Court, where the unanimous ruling in Cooper reaffirmed federal law-but left in place the maddening ambiguities of "all deliberate speed."

While other accounts have focused on the showdown on the schoolhouse steps, Freyer takes readers into the courts to reveal the centrality of black citizens' efforts to the origins and outcome of the crisis. He describes the work of the Little Rock NAACP--with its Legal Defense Fund led by Thurgood Marshall and Wiley Branton--in defining the issues and abandoning gradualism in favor of direct confrontation with the segregationist South. He also includes the previously untold account of Justice William Brennan's surprising influence upon Justice Felix Frankfurter's controversial concurring opinion, which preserved his own "deliberate speed" wording from Brown.

With Cooper, the "well morticed high wall" of segregation had finally cracked. As the most important test of Brown, which literally contained the means to thwart its own intent, it presaged the civil rights movement's broader nonviolent mass action combining community mobilization and litigation to finally defeat Jim Crow. It was not only a landmark decision, but also a turning point in America's civil rights struggle.

In 1849 Chief Justice Taney's Court delivered a 5-4 decision on the legal status of immigrants and free blacks under the federal commerce power. The closely divided decision, further emphasized by the fact there were eight opinions, played a part in the increasingly contested politics over growing immigration, and the controversies about fugitive slaves and the western expansion of slavery that resulted in the Compromise of 1850.

In the decades after the Civil War federal regulation of immigration almost entirely displaced the role of the states. Yet, over a century later, Justice Scalia in "Arizona v. US" appealed to the era when states exercised greater control over who they allowed to cross their borders; a dissent which has returned the Passenger Cases to the contemporary relevance. The Passenger Cases provide a counter-history that allowed the Court to affirm federal supremacy and state-federal cooperation in "Arizona I" (2011) and "II" (2012).

In "The Passenger Cases and the Commerce Clause" Tony Allan Freyer focuses on the antebellum Supreme Court's role prescribing state-federal regulation of immigrants, the movement of free blacks within the United States and on the origins, state court decisions, federal precedents, appellate arguments, and opinion-making that culminated in the Court's decision of the "Passenger Cases." The Court's split decision provided political legitimacy for the 1850 Compromise: enactment of a stronger fugitive slave law, admission of slavery in western territories based on popular vote of residents (popular sovereignty), and the abolition of the slave trade in Washington D.C. The divided opinions in the "Passenger Cases" also influenced the immigrant and slavery crises which disrupted the balance between free and slave-labor states, culminating in the Civil War. The states did indeed enact laws enabling exclusion of undesirable white immigrants and free blacks.

The 5-4 division of the Court anticipated the better known, but even more divisive, views of the Justices in the "Dred Scott" case (1857). And in considering the post-Reconstruction evolution of new standards by which to judge immigration issues, the Passenger Cases revealed the continuing controversy over how to treat those who wish to come to our country, even as federal law came to dominate the regulation of immigration. These issues continued to complicate immigration law as much today as they did more than a century and a half ago. The persistence of these problems suggested that a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind" continued to demand a coherent, humane, and more consistent immigration policy.