In January 1932, two white women--Agnes Boeing Ilsley and Mina Buckner--were murdered in Ilsley's home in rural Middleburg, Virginia. Suspicion of who the murderer was settled on George Crawford, an African American man who was sometimes employed by Mrs. Ilsley to do various jobs, including serving as her chauffeur (Virginia Circuit Court 1933, 108; Kluger 1975, 147). The Crawford case, while seemingly far removed from the history of education, provides rich contextual insights as to how the pursuit of basic legal rights for Black Americans was closely intertwined with educational history. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) provided Crawford with legal counsel. Assisting the Boston attorneys acting on behalf of the NAACP was Charles H. Houston of the Howard University School of Law in Washington, DC. As Crawford's defense attorney, Houston implicitly communicated throughout the trial proceedings the purposes of Black legal education. Those purposes were rooted in the notion of re-engineering a society crafted to withhold fundamental constitutional rights from Black citizens, including the right to a fair trial. This article explores how the Crawford case is a useful vehicle for understanding the needs, purposes, and pedagogy of legal education for African Americans in the years preceding the modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and concludes with a brief discussion of how the trial transcript and other related primary source materials have potential as effective teaching tools in educational history courses.