"The words "civil rights' summon up memories and images in modern minds of grainy television footage of packed mass meetings, firehoses and police dogs, of early 1960s peaceful protestors replaced over time by violent rioters, of soul-stirring oratory and bold actions, of assassination and death," writes Julian Bond, the 1960s African American civil rights activist. "But there were life and death struggles for civil rights long before the words were introduced into American homes on the evening news." For many Americans, the civil rights movement refers to the effort during the 1950s and 1960s to end racial segregation and to extend to all Americans, regardless of race, the full rights of citizenship. But almost two centuries before Thurgood Marshall challenged school segregation laws in court, before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, public bus, before...