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

"The Great Dissenter is the story of John Marshall Harlan, the famous lone dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court’s infamous 1896 decision upholding racial segregation. But Harlan – a white man from a prosperous, upper-crust, slave-owning family in Kentucky – was more than a dissenter in that single ruling. In case after case after the Civil War, he dissented, usually alone, when the court sought to nullify many of the measures that Congress had enacted to protect the rights of African Americans and newly freed slaves. Notable in his backstory is that his father had sought, bought, and brought back to the family home a slave child that was schooled with John. Robert Harlan, likely John’s half-brother, would go on to enormous successes, overcoming many of the obstacles placed in his way. This book is his story too. It’s one of the finest judicial biographies I have read – and I have read quite a few. Author Peter S. Canellos has done himself, and John Marshall Harlan, proud."