The Black O: Racism and Redemption in an American Corporate Empire.

• Author: Parker, John L., Jr.

If you thought that blatant, pervasive, corporate-sponsored racism could not exist in America in the last quarter of the 20th century, read The Black O: Racism and Redemption in an american Corporate Empire, by Steve Watkins.

Although it is actually a painstakingly researched account of the largest private civil rights case in U.S. history, at times it reads like an old-fashioned detective story.

In it you'll meet Ray Danner, an animated, banty rooster of a man who became the 266th richest person in America building the multi-million dollar Shoney's restaurant empire. And he did so, apparently, by spending the bulk of his days flying and driving around the South to various company restaurants adjusting thermostats, weighing pieces of fish, and instructing managers to keep black employees either out of sight in the kitchen, or off the payroll altogether. (A blackened "O" in the word Shoney's on an employment application signified to managers that the applicant was black.)

Enter Henry and Billie Elliott, a white married couple who managed a Captain D's seafood restaurant, which is part of the company that also owns Shoney's. They were fired in 1988 primarily because they refused to fire black employees and replace them with white ones at their Panama City, Fla., restaurant.

What happened to the Elliotts, it turns out, was not particularly unusual in Dannerland, but their reaction was. They took their story to Tallahassee attorney Tommy Warren, who had some experience as a civil rights litigator. At the time, Warren wasn't looking to take on any major cases, but the Elliotts' story intrigued him enough to investigate further.

He began pulling on that single loose strand of evidence, and the more he tugged the more incriminating incidents and witnesses he found. After four years and thousands of hours of painstaking detective work and court battles, that single thread eventually unraveled a massive tapestry of intentional, illegal, corporatewide racist behavior and led to the largest class of plaintiffs ever certified in the federal civil rights action, Haynes et al. v. Shoney's, Inc. In 1992, Warren won the largest settlement ever entered in such a case: $132.5 million, the bulk of which was distributed to more than 20,000 victims of the company's discrimination.

But to synopsize this case is to trivialize not only Watkins' book, but also the monumental work of Warren and his co-counsel, Barry Goldstein, making the day-to-day course of the...