The Hocutt Catalyst - Book One

A lawyer. A mentor. A movement. A choice that changed a nation.

Book One of the Pearson Trilogy.

I have told this story badly for forty years. I am going to tell it badly again.

Durham, North Carolina, 1933. Thomas Hocutt, a young Black man, applies to the University of North Carolina's School of Pharmacy and is refused because of his race. Two Black lawyers, Conrad Pearson and Cecil McCoy, take the case. Hocutt v. Wilson is the first direct legal challenge to segregation in higher education in the American South.

A narrator arrives in Durham in 1932, knowing nothing, off a train; in heat, he remembers before he remembers anything else. He goes to work on Parrish Street doing scut, and watches two men decide to do a thing nobody had done.

Thirty-four chapters, and a cast the record actually holds: Conrad Pearson, Cecil McCoy, Louis Austin of the Carolina Times, Thomas Hocutt, Pauli Murray, James Shepard, C. C. Spaulding, William Hastie. Real people, and the central events drawn from the documented record. The novel invents their inner lives and conversations.

Black Wall Street, the Carolina Times, the churches, the college president who would not sign the transcript. The case is lost. Twenty-one years later, it helps win Brown v. Board, and almost nobody remembers the two men who filed it.

For the lawyers, the record let them disappear, and for the ones they could not save.

Continues in The Trench and the Conscience and The Reckoning. The story begins in The Wrong Direction, a prequel, free in this store.

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