In 1951 in the town of Edna, Texas, a field hand named Pedro Hernandez murdered his employer after exchanging words at a gritty cantina. From this seemingly unremarkable small-town murder emerged a landmark civil rights case that would forever change the lives and legal standing of tens of millions of Americans. A team of unknown Mexican American lawyers took the case, Hernandez v. Texas, all the way to the Supreme Court, where they successfully challenged Jim Crow-style discrimination against Mexican Americans.In his law office in San Antonio, a well-known attorney named Gus Garcia listened to the desperate pleas of Pedro Hernandezs mother, who traveled more than one-hundred-and-fifty miles to ask him to defend her son. Garcia quickly realized that there was more to this case than murder; the real concern was not Hernandezs guilt, but whether he could receive a fair trial with an all-Anglo jury deciding his fate. Garcia assembled a team of courageous attorneys who argued on behalf of...