United States district judges have, regardless of their personal views the awesome assignment of forcing compliance with the Supreme Court's 1954 school segregation decisions. In the District of Columbia and in the border states of Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland, for the most part authorities have completed, or are completing, school integration. They did not wait for a judge to order them to do so. Here the courts' function is primarily to prod a few laggard districts. Those men who serve as Federal judges in the 11 Southern states have a much tougher assignment: school boards, responsive primarily to white voters, have been unable or unwilling to act. The full burden of forcing compliance, of presiding over this major social revolution, has fallen on 48 district judges. This book describes how these important but still little-known men, and their 10 immediate superiors on the Courts of Appeals, have responded to the challenge. Today, the judge and his courtroom have become center stage for a highly charged conflict between contestants with fundamentally opposed demands. Segregationists expect the judge, himself a white southerner, to save a sacred institution; the nation as a whole, whose servant he is, and Negroes in particular, expect him to abolish segregation. Segregationists lost their case at the Supreme Court, but they demand that the district judge in the South save their cause. (Author/JM)