As it took shape during World War II and the early Cold War, the battle against racial injustice proceeded along two tracks: at the grass roots and in governing institutions — federal courts, state legislatures, and ultimately the U.S. Congress. Labor unions, churches, and protest organizations such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) inspired hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens to join the movement. But grassroots struggle was not African Americans’ only weapon. They also had the Bill of Rights and the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution. Civil rights lived in those documents — especially in the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection under the law to all U.S. citizens, and in the Fifteenth, which guaranteed the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” — but had been ignored or violated for nearly a century. The task was to restore the Constitution’s legal force. Neither track — grassroots or legal/legislative — was entirely independent of the other. Together, they were the foundation of the fight for racial equality in the postwar decades.