In November 1946, Shull stood trial in Waring’s courtroom. Gergel provides a detailed account of the incompetent and racist lawyering conducted by the government’s attorneys. Woodard’s testimony profoundly affected Waring and his wife, forcing them, Gergel writes, to “stare into the Southern racial abyss” as never before. Nevertheless, Shull was acquitted quickly by an all-white jury, with the defense counsel warning that if a “decision against the government means seceding, then let South Carolina secede again.” Waring called the trial’s travesty of justice his “baptism of fire.”

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Gergel intersperses the Waring and Woodard narratives with chapters on President Truman’s own coming-to-conscience on civil rights. The turning point for Truman, who came from a Missouri family steeped in Confederate culture, seems to have been a conversation at the White House in September 1946 with the N.A.A.C.P. leader Walter White, who related the details of Woodard’s blinding. The next day, Truman wrote to his attorney general to request the formation of a presidential committee on civil rights. Over the following two years, he gave a stunning speech on racial equality at the Lincoln Memorial, desegregated the military by executive order and released the committee’s report, “To Secure These Rights,” declaring a dire need for federal intervention to overcome all manner of racial discrimination. Truman’s actions sent shock waves among Southern Democrats and led to the formation of the Dixiecrats in the presidential campaign of 1948.

Back in Charleston, Waring continued to rule against peonage and the Democrats’ white primaries. He and his wife were vilified, and the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross at their home, an incident that garnered national press coverage. Both Warings made public statements during this painful saga, the judge declaring that it was time for South Carolina to “rejoin the Union,” as he threatened to jail white men for preventing black people from voting.

Gergel brings his riveting narrative to a climax with the Briggs v. Elliott case of 1951. This school segregation suit from rural Clarendon County brought hundreds of black citizens to Waring’s court for the first time, and though the three-judge panel ruled 2 to 1 in favor of sustaining “separate” schools, Waring’s famous dissent, arguing that “segregation is per se inequality,” eventually led the N.A.A.C.P. to mount a frontal assault at the Supreme Court against the Plessy doctrine of “separate but equal.”

The great value of “Unexampled Courage” is that it might garner a broad audience for the kinds of heroism involved in this history of litigation, all of which was a necessary prelude to the direct-action crusade of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Gergel may place too much emphasis on individual agency in this story, but it is impossible to deny the pivotal role of these figures: Harry and Eliza Briggs and the Rev. Joseph DeLaine, the plaintiffs in Briggs, who risked all and lost their jobs; the titanic Marshall and his lawyerly activists, who assembled a mountain of facts to overwhelm Jim Crow’s wiliest ways; a depressed, blinded Isaac Woodard, who lived out his life mostly on charity in the Bronx; a president from a neo-Confederate corner of Missouri; and, finally, a judge who committed treason to his race and class to try to move the South into modernity.

Would that Chief Justice John Roberts and his four fellow conservative justices might read this riveting legal history and rethink the decision in Shelby v. Holder of 2013, which eviscerated federal oversight of voting rights in the Deep South. But while we wait for that unlikelihood, we should remember that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed because of the history Gergel recounts. When Waring met Truman at the White House in 1948, they shared their memories of learning about Woodard’s blinding. Then Waring told the president that most white South Carolinians “will not voluntarily do anything along the lines suggested by you,” and that it was “necessary for the federal government to firmly and constantly keep up the pressure.”

We live in a nation still stymied by the tradition of states’ rights and by racism. Equality, especially the right to vote, is still at the mercy of local beliefs and practices. In 1956, James Baldwin reminded us why we have laws: “It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God; it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.”