Gomillion Versus Lightfoot

Originally published in 1962, this book is the true account of Gomillion v. Lightfoot, a case concerned with the denial of Negro voting rights in Tuskegee, Alabama in order to politically manipulate that township's boundaries, and the first case of its kind to be argued before the Supreme Court.


Brilliantly and accurately documented, this is a probing report by Bernard Taper, one of the leading reporters for The New Yorker magazine, who traveled first to Tuskegee and later to Washington, in order to skilfully weave together the background material and the entire case.


Taper followed the case from its inception in 1957, through to the personal reactions of Tuskegee's citizens as they became involved, and finally to the Supreme Court in 1960, where he provides a remarkable portrait of the court action and of the Justices as they worked toward their final decision…


A gripping read.


"Bernard Taper has done an extraordinary job of reporting not only the tangled facts of the Tuskegee Affair, but the feelings of those who were involved in it. With discernment and sympathy he deals with the deep currents of emotion that are eroding the sense of community that once marked the small towns of the South—a far more significant phenomenon than the occasional spectacular flares of racial violence."—Harry Ashmore, Pulitzer prize-winning newspaper editor, author of An Epitaph for Dixie, and editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica


"I only wish that every great constitutional cause could be illuminated by such a valuable and absorbing account of its background as the one Mr. Taper has given us for the Gomillion case."—Professor Charles L. Black, Jr., Yale Law School