Ending a period of indecision, Hugo Black becomes a candidate for the US Senate after Senator Oscar Underwood announces his decision not to seek reelection. Black resigns from the Klan and conducts a long, vigorous campaign that takes him into virtually every Alabama county and most crossroads before the end of 1925. His formal announcement comes in the spring of 1926 at the Clay County courthouse where he lays out a generally progressive platform for change echoing the Populist sentiments that he heard in his Clay County childhood and more recently in his informal talks among common folk. After visiting once more every county, Black wins the election against a prestigious group of opponents whom Black described as "millionaires and corporation lawyers."

In early May, longstanding rumors of Senator Underwood's retirement were reborn when his office confirmed that the Senator's family had purchased a country estate with a hundred and twenty acres and a Georgian house of twenty-two rooms near Mt. Vernon--in those days, sixteen long miles south of Washington.

Friends of attorney John Bankhead, who recently sold his Jasper mining company for $1 million, affirmed his intentions to follow his father's career. Former state supreme court justice James J. Mayfield of Tuscaloosa also was mentioned as a fitting successor. And, by the first of June, Hugo Black had changed his mind again. "Judge Black will announce his candidacy upon a progressive platform," his statement read.

Eight days after Underwood's announced retirement, Black wrote a very brief, handwritten letter of resignation to the local klavern secretary on the grand dragon's KKK stationary and signed it, "Yours ITSUB" (In The Sacred, Unfailing Bond).

Black bought a Whippet, an inexpensive car smaller and somewhat less reliable than Ford's Model T. Over the next five months, Black traveled the state...

At the start of 1926, Black wasn't Alabama's only political renegade. Bibb Graves, former adjutant general of the state militia, was running for governor against the "railroad lawyers and wet politicians" and without support of any daily newspaper.

Black declared that the true public servant's role in "the age-old struggle between those who have and those who want is to hold the scales of justice evenly."

"If the time has come when public office goes to the highest bidder," Black announced, "I lift my voice in vain. I could not compete with the millionaire opponents on an advertising or money-spending campaign. I would not, if I could."

It was in Sheffield, near the Muscle Shoals dam, in late May where Black gathered his momentum... more than a thousand people stood inside the hangar, listening for more than two hours. Black told them that the dam which stood idle only five miles away at the Tennessee River should be put into operation for producing cheap fertilizer for farmers and electricity in their homes.

Bankhead accused Black of being a rich man who owned Birmingham real estate worth a quarter of a million dollars. "If Mr. Black lived in several Alabama counties, he would be the richest citizen in the county and would be known as the Duke," Bankhead charged.

Judge Mayfield condemned any man who would go to Washington to represent one faction, class, or clan."

On July 10, the candidate's campaign manager sent letters to local klaverns, heralding Wizard Evans's endorsement of Musgrove. "Dr. Evans regards this as a sacred promise, which the Klan should keep," the message insisted.

In Clay, Hugo's old friends lined up a hundred automobiles for a cavalcade of "Black" banners, pasted above the sideboards, announcing hometown support as they visited a half dozen towns in surrounding counties.