Samuel Wilbert Tucker: The Story of a Civil Rights Trailblazer and the 1939 Alexandria Library Sit-In

Refused a library card to borrow books, Tucker organized the earliest documented civil rights sit-in at a public library on August 21, 1939. This nonviolent act of civil disobedience challenged "Jim Crow" segregation twenty years before the sit-ins of the 1960s. This biography of NAACP lawyer S.W. Tucker, an unsung hero of the Civil Rights Movement, tells how his life and work were dedicated to ending racial discrimination and securing racial justice. He argued cases against over 50 Virginia school boards in the 1950s and 1960s to desegregate public schools. In his 1968 case, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that school boards could no longer delay desegregating public schools and had to show immediate progress.