Standing Against Dragons is an account of the careers of three of the most prominent lawyers who defended civil rights and supported civil liberties for 20 years following the Second World War. These three civil rights attorneys are Clifford Durr of Montgomery, Alabama; Benjamin Smith of New Orleans; and John Coe of Pensacola, Florida. They became dissenters from the south, going against the repression in the southern segregation laws and the anti-Communist right.

In spite of Coe, Durr and Smith being sons of southern gentry and introduced in the district’s conservative custom, they were quite familiar with the postwar years with the Southern Conference Education Fund and the left-liberal National Lawyers Guild. The three lawyers defended and appeared with their clients in the well-recognized investigation of the Southern Conference Educational Fund in 1954 and represented people subpoenaed by the HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee).

John Coe defended the devoted integrationist, who was the last person the HUAC charged for contempt. Benjamin Smith’s offices were raided in the early 1960s due to his support of civil rights causes in Mississippi. Sarah Hart Brown’s Standing Against Dragons is an analysis that exposed the extensive range of southern political stands and defined the views of radicals and southern liberals in the wider stream of American liberalism in the era after the war.

Standing Against Dragons: 3 Southern Lawyers in an Era of Fear is truly a very enlightening and insightful book on how law was practiced during the 1940s, 50s and the 60s. The book brought to life a time when prejudice and controversy were present in an evolving America. It likewise exemplifies the disorderly period of racial discrimination and anti-communism in the course of political struggles of a partisan culture.