The civil rights attorney Julius Chambers has died at the age of 76 after a long illness. According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Chambers was a founding member of the first racially integrated law firm in North Carolina who litigated and argued a number of key desegregation and voting rights cases before the Supreme Court. The group said in a statement: “[Julius Chambers] was a man of tremendous courage. His home and his car were firebombed on separate occasions in 1965, and his office was burned to the ground in 1971, during the height of some of his most contentious civil rights litigation in North Carolina. When he spoke of these events, Chambers was typically matter-of-fact, insisting always that you 'just keep fighting.'” Julius Chambers died on Friday in North Carolina.