Fay Stender was a giant among movement lawyers from the McCarthy Era to the 1970s intent on forcing society to change. Friends could easily picture her as the heroine of a grand opera. A child prodigy, she abandoned the concert piano to become a zealous advocate for society's most scorned and vilified criminal defendants: from the Rosenberg espionage case during the Cold War to militant black clients, Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, and revolutionary prisoner George Jackson, to prisoners in maximum security. Stender achieved amazing legal successes in criminal defense and prison reform before she ultimately refocused with similar zeal on feminist and lesbian rights. Set against a backdrop of sit-ins, protest marches, riots, police brutality, assassinations, death penalty trials, and bitter splits among Leftists, this book makes for a compelling biography. Yet it delivers on a broader goal, as well- an overview of the turbulent era in which Fay Stender operated under the watchful eye of the FBI and state officials. We not only relive Stender's story, but that of a small cadre of committed Bay Area activists who played remarkable roles during the McCarthy Era, Civil Rights Movement, the Free Speech Movement, Vietnam War protests, and the riots of Black Power.
