Standing Against Dragons examines the careers of three exceptional lawyers who championed civil liberties and fought for civil rights in the two decades after World War II. John Coe of Pensacola, Florida, Clifford Durr of Montgomery, Alabama, and Benjamin Smith of New Orleans became southern dissenters, resisting both the excessive zeal of the anti-Communist right and the oppression embodied in southern segregation laws.

Although they all were sons of southern gentry and were educated in the region's conservative tradition, they identified in the postwar years with both the left-liberal National Lawyers Guild and the Southern Conference Education Fund.

Coe, Durr, and Smith all appeared with their clients in the much-publicized 1954 investigation of the Southern Conference Educational Fund and defended persons subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Coe represented the ardent integrationist who was the last man indicted for contempt by HUAC, and Smith's offices were raided in 1963 as a result of his civil rights work in Mississippi.

Sarah Hart Brown's analysis reveals the wide range of southern political ideas and defines the positions of southern liberals and radicals in the broader stream of American liberalism during the postwar period.