First settled by French traders, outposts along the Red and Kiamichi Rivers attracted the social outcasts and vagrants that tended to congregate at the frontier, where law was scant and where an abundance of diligence or a shortage of scruples could yield a man a small fortune. In 1824, the United States established Fort Towson near the juncture of the two rivers to protect settlers in western Arkansas from hostile Plains Indians and from the threat of Mexican invasion. At the time that the fort was established at the far western frontier of a young United States, the newly independent Republic of Mexico lay just on the far side of the Red River a few miles to the south. The land soon became the Choctaw Nation after the tribe became the first of many forcibly removed from the southeastern United States and resettled in Indian Territory in the 1830s. It was then used over time as a staging ground for attacks on native tribes to the west, a commercial center and source of law and order for fur trappers and settlers coming in from the east, a hub for the resettlement of the Choctaw and Chickasaw tribes, a staging ground for the US Army during the Mexican-American War, and, briefly, a Confederate headquarters during the Civil War. By 1939 the fort had long ago been abandoned and given back to the forest. But though it had been nearly a century since the military outpost had been put to any real use, the town that had blossomed in its shadow was alive and buzzing. Just fifteen miles down the highway was Hugo, the political and economic hub of Choctaw County.*1

As in much of the country, and the world, the 1930s had been a disorienting and difficult decade for Oklahoma. The Great Depression, which devastated the global economy, hit particularly hard as a glut in oil production and the general economic decline sent petroleum prices tumbling—incomes in the state saw the third-greatest decline in the country. Decades of ill-advised and destructive farming practices had robbed huge tracts of the western plains of the prairie grasses that for eons had held the earth in place, and when drought struck, the wind picked up the topsoil and carried it away in monstrous clouds that blinded and choked farm animals, and some humans too, as the winds rumbled east across the continent. The Dust Bowl devastation sent pitiful throngs of refugees fleeing to safety in the west, toward California.

In eastern Oklahoma, commodity prices—especially for cotton—that had soared during the First World War tumbled in the 1920s and didn’t rebound when the decade kicked over. Between 1935 and 1940, eighty thousand Oklahomans, many of them sharecroppers, fled the state, double or more the number of refugees from any other state in the union. One in six farmers was driven off the land, their abandoned farms snapped up by predatory mortgage and insurance companies and big-money landholders.

And yet, for all the economic hardship, life in Choctaw County trundled on, and by 1939 Hugo was on the cusp of a rebound, with a growing population of nearly six thousand and more than one hundred retail stores and restaurants. Fort Towson had two cotton gins, a few banks, and even two speakeasy beer joints—two more than the law allowed in officially dry Oklahoma. Though Prohibition at the federal level ended in 1933, Oklahomans would continue voting dry, as Okie humorist Will Rogers famously quipped, “as long as they can stagger to the polls.” That day wouldn’t come until 1959. The town hosted a large general store, where you could buy whiskey under the counter, and a fire department. A little passenger train known as “the dinky” traveled up and down the railroad that ran roughly parallel to Highway 70, stopping at each little town along the way between Hugo and Idabel. Neighbors knew each other by name, and many didn’t even have locks on their doors, much less use them. If a passerby happened to be thirsty, it was commonplace to stop in at a neighbor’s house and help oneself to a glass of water.

The state that began as a kind of concentration camp for indigenous tribes had become the land of opportunity for white and black settlers alike. After the Civil War, enslaved people in Indian Territory were set free, and over time more former slaves and their descendants moved to the state hoping to carve out a new future apart from the centuries of cruel servitude that had shaped life and culture in the Old South. Many of them succeeded, to a degree, establishing all-black towns like Boley, Rentiesville, and Langston. They found opportunity in pockets, but the racism of turn-of-the-century America ran deep in Oklahoma too. The first act of the Oklahoma legislature after achieving statehood in 1907 was to pass a law that defined anyone with any African ancestry as black and banned interracial marriage and interracial schools. Many of the same attitudes, Jim Crow laws, and racist cultural mores that characterized the Deep South prevailed in Oklahoma too. This was especially true in the state’s southeastern quadrant, a region known colloquially as Little Dixie, with the strongest ties to the former Confederacy. The divisions and scars of racist oppression only deepened as Oklahoma’s economy soured in the 1920s and ’30s.

But on that Sunday night in 1939, residents of Choctaw County, black and white alike, celebrated.

Shortly after sunset a waning gibbous moon glowed over the snow-covered fields and forests surrounding Fort Towson, and the sounds of worshippers issued softly from the Holiness Church. Outside the church, people scuttled about the neighborhood, a small section on the west side of town of about a dozen black families’ homes that residents called the Quarters and whites on the other side of town called the Nigger Quarters. They observed New Year’s Eve modestly, talking and joking about this and that, or idling near the “troll bridge” that spanned the branch of what locals called Negro Creek, which ran through the community. Some were warm and tipsy, having taken the occasional swig throughout the day from a jug of moonshine, or “wildcat” as people called illegal whiskey in southeastern Oklahoma. Now and then, musicians in Donna Scott’s Cafe would strike up a tune, sending music, fleetingly, into the cool evening air, like plumes of warm breath condensing in the cold. A long stretch of icy winter weather finally broke that Sunday, and for the first time in days the temperature rose mercifully above freezing. Just.

A twenty-one-year-old farmhand named Willie D. Lyons—known to his friends as W.D.—lived with his wife at his mother-in-law’s house in Hugo, but on New Year’s Eve he was in Fort Towson, where he had been raised. He spent a leisurely afternoon in and around the Quarters, hanging out with friends on the neighborhood’s dirt streets, sometimes sneaking off to swig from a jug of wildcat hidden in the trees near the creek. He spent a while splitting wood for his wife and went rabbit hunting, without success, in the open pasture just beyond the thicket on the western boundary of the Quarters. As he meandered among the neighborhood’s humble houses throughout the day, stopping for a hamburger at Donna Scott’s Cafe, saying hello to friends and relatives, and finally turning in for the evening at his mother’s house, he had with him a shotgun he’d borrowed from a friend. He carried the gun broken down into two parts, the barrel separated from the stock, with both pieces concealed furtively in newspaper. Lyons didn’t have a hunting license.

Through the trees on the western perimeter of the Quarters, in the middle of the large field where Lyons had been hunting earlier that day, stood a ramshackle three-room farmhouse where Elmer and Marie Rogers lived with their three children. They were white sharecroppers and very poor, without money to buy window curtains for their sparse home or even enough chairs for the whole family to sit together at the dinner table.

As the moon rose over southeastern Oklahoma, while some in Fort Towson worshipped at church and others brought in the new year in their own fashion with family and friends, Elmer and Marie Rogers lay dead in their home. Elmer was prostrate on the floor between the two beds, surrounded by his own blood and shards of broken glass, his ribs full of buckshot, shattered and splintered, his skull crushed. Marie lay on the porch with a gunshot wound in her torso and her skull asunder. Her blood, brains, and the shattered pieces of her jaw were scattered about her corpse.

When the shooting started, Marie had yelled to her eldest son, seven-year-old James Glenn, to get the baby, Billie Don, and run. While he and his brothers hid in bed, James Glenn caught a glimpse of an intruder’s hand in the darkness. After the men left, there was a tense quiet in the house while the children hid in terror, until the crackling and popping of wood set afire overtook the silence. Afraid that the four-year-old, Elvie Dean, would cry if he jostled him, and draw back the men who had murdered his parents, James Glenn grabbed the baby and ran.

Flames began to crawl out the windows of the house, lapping at the frigid nighttime air. Soon the entire structure ignited. The blaze, bright and orange against the flickering darkness, lit up the barren field. With the baby in his arms, a child carrying a child, James Glenn took off in a desperate sprint from the glowing inferno behind him. Down by the highway that ran east to Fort Towson and west to Hugo, he huddled in the cold near the road with his baby brother, stunned and terrified. A husband and wife from a few towns away who were driving west toward Hugo from Fort Towson spotted James Glenn by the highway. They stopped the car, doubled back, and saw that the boy had a baby with him. The couple loaded the children into the car and drove them back to Fort Towson. James Glenn’s four-year-old brother, Elvie Dean, was still inside the house. He was burning alive.

Four years earlier, Marshall had moved from Baltimore to New York with his wife, Buster, to work full-time with the NAACP under the guidance of Charles Houston, his mentor and the former dean of Howard University Law School. In July 1938, Houston left New York, anxious to return home to his private practice in Washington, DC, and by 1939 Marshall was officially at the helm of the NAACP’s legal office.

Like the organization for which he was now special counsel, the young lawyer still struggled to pay the bills—the promotion had included a small bump in pay of $200, bringing his meager salary to $2,600 a year, which he and Buster sometimes supplemented by delivering groceries for their Harlem co-op—but life in frenzied New York suited him. An energetic and affable bon vivant, Marshall relished Harlem’s social life, dining and drinking often with friends, whom he regaled with stories of his frequent travels throughout the United States representing downtrodden clients and raising money for the cash-strapped NAACP. In the words of his former classmate at all-black Lincoln University, the poet Langston Hughes, Marshall was “good-natured, rough, ready and uncouth.” A stark contrast to his predecessor Houston—a stony-faced former army officer—Marshall’s jocular antics lit up the national office near Manhattan’s Union Square, his towering, lanky frame and generous laugh bringing a welcome dose of levity to the vital work of battling the state-sponsored terrorism and systemic racist oppression that ruled over the lives of America’s thirteen million black citizens.

Seismic changes in the way information was distributed and consumed across the country, like the widespread adoption of the radio, had created a new mass culture in the United States. Under the leadership of its ebullient national secretary, Walter White, the NAACP had become adept at influencing public opinion. Through public protests, the NAACP’s national magazine The Crisis, and relationships with journalists around the country—most prominently among African American newspapers—White used his eye for drama and keen sense of an emerging pop culture in America to raise awareness of the plight of black Americans, especially in the South. White pressured companies, with some success, to drop the use of racist epithets in product names such as “Pickaninny Peppermints” and “Nigger Head Shrimp.” Though southern Democrats in Washington blocked any legislation that would make lynching a federal offense and thus compel the federal government to prosecute perpetrators when state governments would not, the NAACP made substantial progress throughout the 1930s in waging a public opinion campaign to push back against the vigilantism and mob violence that terrorized black communities. Statistics compiled by the Tuskegee Institute show that in 1900, 106 black citizens were lynched in the United States (in comparison, 9 whites were lynched that year); in 1930, 20 black citizens were lynched (1 white was lynched that year); 24 black citizens were lynched in 1933, and 18 in 1935. In 1936, without the force of federal legislation compelling Washington to put an end to the horrific practice, the number of lynchings of black Americans fell to 8, and declined—if maddeningly slowly—in the decades that followed. Until 1938, out of its headquarters high above Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the NAACP flew a black-and-white flag with a chilling reminder: A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY.

Though he first resisted getting drawn into Walter White’s public spectacles, preferring instead to focus on the plodding, deliberate campaign pioneered by Charles Houston to transform American society through the law, Marshall came to see the value in projecting soft power to transform the culture. He took on his own mini-crusade to get the American Tobacco Co.—the conglomerate formed in 1890 by J. B. Duke, whose fortune would one day undergird Duke University—to discontinue use of the tobacco brand name “Nigger Hair.” During his cross-country travels for the NAACP, Marshall built on an earlier success in securing equal pay for black teachers in his home state of Maryland by meeting with black teachers and lawyers locally to encourage and help them to organize legal challenges to the race pay gap in their own states. Marshall joined in White’s antilynching campaign, lobbying members of Congress in DC and tracking the progress—or lack thereof—of antilynching legislation.

Notwithstanding his forays into traditional activism, congressional lobbying, and the like, the bulk of Marshall’s work remained in the legal office, where he stayed as busy as he could stand to be. A hectic travel itinerary kept him crisscrossing the country on buses and trains at a fevered pace, representing clients who had been wronged on account of their race and, perhaps of greater importance, whose cases might establish legal precedent that would reach far beyond any single client’s plight and thus move the needle for black Americans in favor of full racial equality before the law. Though the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 had enshrined full protection of the law to all citizens equally, day-to-day life for black Americans hardly reflected that promise. Little had been done to apply those protections at the state level, and virtually no progress would be made on that front until momentous Supreme Court decisions found that the promise of equal protection of law required the states to extend those protections to black Americans. This reality illustrates the hard-nosed truth that underpinned the NAACP’s legal work: the constitution of the United States means what the Supreme Court says it means. Under Charles Houston, the NAACP’s legal program had embarked on a crusade that was both stealthy and extraordinarily ambitious; theirs would be a clandestine insurrection to transform America’s oppressive and racist legal system from within.

Black citizens throughout the country, but particularly in the South, lived under a variety of racist legal codes and traditions, known commonly as Jim Crow laws, designed to systematically block African Americans from attaining any meaningful degree of economic, social, or political power. Black citizens throughout the South were barred from voting in elections or from taking part in the primaries through which the Democratic Party selected its candidates, effectively excluding them from the political process entirely in the Democratic Party–dominated South. Black teachers were paid less than white, black schools funded less per pupil than their white counterparts, and black students barred from attending most state universities and professional schools.

The entire edifice of this program of systemic black oppression rested on a legal doctrine of “separate but equal” that emerged from the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court upheld the right of a railroad to remove Homer Plessy from a first-class car after he, in a highly orchestrated act of civil disobedience, informed the railroad that he was one-eighth black, sufficiently African in Louisiana for him to be barred from the whites-only section of the train. The decision upheld the legality of segregated facilities that were then cropping up across the South in the years after Reconstruction, when occupying Union troops pulled out and former Confederates sought to reassert white supremacy. This new regime of segregation used laws and mores to buttress white dominance and render black Americans politically impotent.

The separate but equal doctrine would allow public institutions to remain segregated so long as the state provided facilities for black citizens equal to those for whites. But the doctrine was a farce. The institutions that upheld white supremacy in the United States had no real interest in creating equal facilities for black Americans, and even if they had, such a proposition—creating two of everything—would have been prohibitively expensive. Many states lacked any professional schools for black students, and even in elementary schools where separate facilities did exist they were hardly equal. Thurgood Marshall’s alma mater in Baltimore was the only high school in the city for black students, and it also served black students from surrounding counties. The severely overcrowded building lacked a cafeteria, auditorium, gymnasium, or any large meeting space—for any large gatherings the school had to borrow space from a nearby church or theater.

Faced with an entrenched system of racial apartheid backed by Supreme Court precedent, in 1930 the NAACP commissioned attorney Nathan Margold, a Romanian-born Jewish immigrant and recent Harvard Law graduate, to devise a strategy to combat the legal underpinnings of Jim Crow. The resulting Margold Report called for a surgical assault on segregation. Rather than attack separate but equal...