In the 2014 historical novel Natchez Burning, by Greg Iles, chapter 29:
A black Mississippian who left his native state in the early 1950s to go to law school, Quentin Avery fought on the front lines of the civil rights movement, wherever those lines happened to be.
And in chapter 38:
During the 1960s and '70s, Quentin argued four cases before the United States Supreme Court—one a landmark civil rights case—and won them all. He became a hero to many, and his name was mentioned in the same sentences as Thurgood Marshall and James Nabrit. But by the mid-1980s, the young firebrand had turned his mind to lucre rather than to justice, taking on high-profile (and very profitable) drug cases. In the 1990s he moved on to personal injury cases, two of which made him genuinely wealthy.
Is this fictional description modeled after someone real? If so, whom?