Assuming the risk

"Michael Orey recounts the unprecedented defeat of big tobacco. In 1985, Nathan Horton, a building contractor in rural Mississippi, developed a chronic ache in his left shoulder. A year and a half later, he was dead from lung cancer. In his final, painful months, Horton had filed suit against the manufacturer of the cigarettes he had smoked for more than thirty years. Horton, who was black, found a most unlikely lawyer to pursue his cause with near-religious zeal: Don Barrett, an arch-segregationist in his youth and an unapologetic defender of the Old South. When he took up his dying…