A lawyer. A mentor. A movement.
In 1933, Thomas Hocutt applied to the University of North Carolina's School of Pharmacy and was refused because he was Black. Two Durham lawyers, Conrad Pearson and Cecil McCoy, took the case. Hocutt v. Wilson was the first direct legal challenge to segregation in higher education in the American South.
They lost. Twenty-one years later the same argument helped win Brown v. Board of Education, and almost nobody remembers the two men who filed it first.
Told across four books by an old law professor who was there, to students who have just survived their examinations. Real people: Pearson, McCoy, Louis Austin of the Carolina Times, Pauli Murray, James Shepard, Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall. The central events are drawn from the documented record.
The whole story, in order
The Wrong Direction. The prequel. Washington, July 1932, the Bonus Army, and a man in an army coat that a younger man crossed the street to avoid. It ends with a ticket south.
The Hocutt Catalyst, Book One. Durham 1933. Parrish Street, Black Wall Street, the Carolina Times, and a college president who would not sign a transcript. Thirty-four chapters.
The Trench and the Conscience, Book Two. What a man does after he loses. He could have gone north to the national office and the famous men. He stayed, and took teacher pay cases county by county. Thirty-three chapters.
The Reckoning, Book Three. The door opens. Five students walk in. And the toll comes due on the far side of it. Thirty-seven chapters.
The three novels bought separately are $23.97. The complete series, prequel included, is $19.
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