What is the main conflict in Gideon's Trumpet by Anthony Lewis?

Clarence Earl Gideon is a fifty-one-year-old white man from the South who believes that he was denied due process of the law because he was not assigned an attorney during his trial in the early 1960s. Gideon, holding to the idea that the Constitution assured him of that right, files a petition with the United States Supreme Court. In fact, the trial courts on the state level are grappling with the question of when a petitioner is to have an attorney. The Gideon case will answer that question once and for all.