Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster
by Stephen L. Carter

She was brilliant, ambitious, and unafraid to break barriers. As the only member of a squad of twenty high-powered lawyers who was not a white male, she devised the strategy that in the 1930s sent Mafia chieftain Lucky Luciano to prison. She achieved so much—but what could she have accomplished if not for barriers of race and gender?

Eunice Hunton Carter, Stephen Carter’s grandmother, was the daughter of a distinguished African American couple and the granddaughter of slaves. A graduate of Smith College and Fordham Law School, she became a key member of the legal team charged with breaking up organized crime in New York City. By the 1940s, she was one of the most famous black women in America. But at every turn, Eunice encountered prejudice, and her triumphs were shadowed by tragedy. Greatly complicating her rise was her difficult relationship with her younger brother, Alphaeus, an avowed Communist who—together with his friend Dashiell Hammett—went to prison during the McCarthy era. Yet she remained unbowed: constantly reinventing herself, she somehow found a way forward.

Moving, haunting, and written with dazzling power, Invisible tells the story of a woman who often found her path blocked by the social and political expectations of the age. But Eunice Carter never accepted defeat, and thanks to her grandson’s remarkable book she is once again visible.