At the end of a round of aggressive questioning by Sen. Dick Durbin on Thursday, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh held up a book and thanked Durbin for giving it to him.

It was not just any book. “Taming the Storm,” by Jack Bass, is a powerful 1992 biography of the legendary late Judge Frank Johnson Jr., one of a handful of white Southern federal judges whose orders and opinions gave legal reinforcement to the civil rights movement, in issues from bus and school segregation to voting rights.