The Heart of Atlanta Supreme Court decision stands among the court’s most significant civil rights rulings.

In Atlanta, Georgia, two arch segregationists vowed to flout the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the sweeping slate of civil rights reforms just signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The Pickrick restaurant was run by Lester Maddox, soon to be
governor of Georgia, and the Heart of Atlanta motel was operated by lawyer Moreton Rolleston Jr. After the law was signed, a group of ministry students–George Willis, Albert Dunn, and Woodrow Lewis–showed up for a plate of skilletfried chicken at the Pickrick; Maddox greeted them with a pistol, axe handles, and
a mob of White supporters. At the Heart of Atlanta, ministers Albert Sampson and Charles Wells sought rooms, but Moreton Rolleston refused to accept the Black patrons.

These confrontations became the centerpiece of the nation’s first two legal challenges to the Civil Rights Act. In gripping detail built from exclusive interviews and original documents, Heart of Atlanta reveals the saga of the case’s rise to the
US Supreme Court, which unanimously rejected the segregationists. Heart of Atlanta restores the legal cases and their heroes to their proper place in history.

Six days after Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans, New Orleans Police Department officers opened fire on residents crossing the Danziger Bridge. When the shooting stopped, a mentally challenged man and a seventeen-year-old boy were dead, riddled with gunshot wounds. A mother’s arm was shot off, her daughter’s stomach gouged with a bullet hole, and her husband’s head pierced by shrapnel. Her nephew was shot in the neck, jaw, stomach, and hand. All six of the victims, along with two others arrested at the scene, were black and unarmed. Before the blood dried, the shooters and their supervisors had hatched a cover-up. They would plant a gun, invent witnesses, and charge two of their victims with attempted murder. The NOPD hailed all the shooters on the bridge as heroes.

Shots on the Bridge explores one of the most dramatic cases of injustice in the last decade. It reveals the fear that gripped the police of a city fallen into anarchy, the circumstances that led desperate survivors to go to the bridge, and the horror that erupted with the gunfire. It dissects the cover-up that nearly buried the truth and the legal maze that, a decade later, leaves the victims still searching for justice.