This series book for middle school students looks at the African-American struggle for civil rights through laws and legal event. The book begins with the Amistad as a watershed event that buoyed the efforts of the abolitionist movement. Also receiving prominent attention are the Dred Scott case; the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments; Jim Crow laws and Plessy v. Ferguson; and the various cases adopted by the NAACP beginning with the Scottsboro case of the 1930s. Weatherford profiles the African-American activists and lawyers who played significant roles in ending violence against African Americans and expanding freedom, among them Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Thurgood Marshall. The book features a chronology, chapter notes, a bibliography for young readers, a list of web sites, and an index., MultiCultural Review March 2001.