The book analyzes the underappreciated history of the evolution of civil rights law in Northern and Western states.

Much has been written about the history of civil rights in the South and federal civil rights law, but Northern and Western states also have a long history of struggle to expand their Black citizens' rights through legal change.

Joseph Ranney's research encompasses the law of slavery in the colonial North and its replacement by antebellum indentured servitude systems; the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, which produced advances in the North more enduring than those of the Reconstruction South; and the long era between the end of Reconstruction and World War II, which was plagued by Jim Crow oppression but brought legal advances in the North and West that paved the way for the national civil rights breakthroughs of the 1950s and 1960s.

The book introduces unsung heroes such as Emma Coger, whose refusal to accept exclusion from a Mississippi River steamboat dining room changed her state's law forever, and Peter Clark, a political maverick who persuaded white Ohio legislators to enact the first state law outlawing discrimination in public places. It examines the rise and fall of legal restrictions that Chinese and Japanese immigrants endured and fought for nearly a century after they arrived in the West, and enumerates many significant historical differences between individual Northern states. Readers interested in current civil rights debates will find the book an indispensable tool for understanding how we got where we are today.