"In the tradition of Gideon's Trumpet, here is the story of Ed Johnson, an illiterate laborer, who in 1906 was arrested for the brutal rape of a young white woman in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Although he could easily prove his innocence, within seventeen days of the crime Johnson was found guilty and sentenced to death in a trial that Oliver Wendell Holmes called "a shameful attempt at justice." When two black lawyers, who weren't even part of the original defense, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of execution, the stay was granted - only to provoke a bloodthirsty mob of frenzied locals to steal justice in a scene of breathtaking horror. What ensued then was dizzying sequence of legal action that changed forever the way law is practiced in the United States.". "In this book, Mark Curriden and Leroy Phillips, Jr., bring to light a Supreme Court decision the overwhelming significance of which Thurgood Marshall asserted had "never been fully explained." Impeccably written and exhaustively researched, Contempt of Court documents brutal and pivotal historical events that only a century later are we coming to understand."--BOOK JACKET.