"I was born a Negro on March 28, 1931, to a seventeen-year-old unwed mother who was two generations away from slavery and had a fourth-grade education. A midwife delivered me, helped by my grandmother and aunts, and I took my first breaths in a three-room sharecropper's shack on a hardscrabble farm located miles down a dusty dirt road in Falls County, Texas, twenty-five miles south of Waco."

So begins John Dearman's unlikely and lucky journey from poverty in segregated and hostile central Texas to law school in Michigan and a prestigious judgeship in San Francisco. With unassuming prose and humility, the author gives not just his own experience, but the context of the time through his knowledge of the law.

His family rooted him, both in his younger years and his later ones, giving him the foundation to succeed. Don't miss this remarkable journey.