On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus. After she was arrested and fined for her refusal, the African American community organized a bus boycott. Ninety-three people were jailed for breaking the city’s anti-boycott statute, but rather than trying all of them, the prosecutors chose to make an example of just one, a 27-year-old minister named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Fred Gray, 24 years old and one of only two black lawyers in Montgomery, had represented Parks and now agreed to defend King in court. The stakes were huge: This was not just a trial about a city statute, this was an attempt to launch a movement in the face of an often-violent effort by a segregated Southern city to prevent them from succeeding. And it would set Gray on a path that would lead him to making an impassioned argument in front of the Supreme Court against segregation in Montgomery’s public transit.

Filled with Gray’s personal recollections as well as King’s own vivid courtroom testimony, this book transports readers to a key moment that is often said to have sparked the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and which introduced Martin Luther King Jr. to the world at large.