A legal journey towards civil right

Book review of The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero

On March 19, 1906, in a horrific act of terror that had become all too common in the South, a white mob descended on a Chattanooga jail and dragged a young Black man from his cell. The man, Ed Johnson, had already been sentenced to death for sexually assaulting a white woman — despite the fact that she couldn’t definitively identify Johnson, and wasn’t even sure if her assailant was Black.

The mob strung Johnson up to the city’s landmark bridge and left his body to hang over the Tennessee River. But murdering him apparently wasn’t enough. The crowd started chanting