Returning to Birmingham courtrooms, Hugo Black represents Mary Miniard, a young white mother married to a semi-skilled worker at US Steel's Ensley plant. The case involves a series of incidents on the Illinois Central Railroad as the Miniards and their baby returned to Birmingham from Chicago in 1919. It is a case that plays out above and below the Mason & Dixon line with Jim Crow, Southern ladies, Northern corporations, class and caste, and the families of Walker Percy and Zelda Fitzgerald. The case marks a turning point in Black's legal career and mirrors the remarkable, enduring nature of the sectional South.

This collective memory always measured friend and foe, neighbor and stranger, by certain words, phrases, accents, colors, and customs that served an unquestioning faith in one separate Southern civilization that never was, but always must be

H. R. Miniard, a crane operator at U.S. Steel's Ensley plant, was on the witness stand, retelling his journey six months earlier with his wife and child on the Illinois Central Railroad in April 1919. Mrs. Miniard was carrying her eight-month-old baby when they boarded the train in Chicago shortly after dark, heading back to Birmingham.

"So the conductor came in just before they got to the Mason & Dixon line, and said that he was awful sorry it happened... we won't have much longer until we get to Cairo,'--I think that is the name of the station; anyway, it divides the North from the South. So when he got there he made all of the colored passengers move, and that was the first action they taken."

"Jim Crow" cars--separate passenger train compartments for blacks--had been legalized by the U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision... black leaders found Jim Crow cars one of the most offensive forms of segregation. African Americans had to pay the same fares as whites to travel in separate facilities that were almost always unequal and degrading.

Birmingham's Avondale Mills was built as a convenient place for poor white women and children to work while husbands went to steel mills ...Women "lint heads" in Alabama's textile mills worked ten to twelve hours each day, and, according to a later survey, had the lowest wages in the nation.

Between April when the Miniards left Chicago and their October trial, the Windy City also endured a race riot... A week later, forty had been killed and more than five hundred injured.

When Hugo Black began his cross-examination of the Illinois Central Railway's conductor, the trainman who worked the route between Illinois and Birmingham, newsboys were on Birmingham's streets, within earshot of the courtroom, crying out, "Read All About Race Riot. Get your paper here. Read All About Race Riot."

Faced with a test of sectional loyalty, Black told judge and jury: "We offer to show that our client was born in Greensboro, Alabama," a small town in the Black Belt where the South's traditional race relations could easily have been born and certainly were well preserved.

By 1919, white Southerners had landscaped their region with innumerable Confederate monuments, erected in recent decades to memorialize an Old South of mythical proportions.

Black argued that Talladega's J. L. M. Curry (the educator named in Uncle Merit Street's will), not the "Reconstruction Regime," was responsible for "the real beginnings of the State school system"....

In 1919, by Southern custom, "nigger" was a commonplace term used in and outside the presence of Negroes. "Coon" was another. Some whites thought "darkey" was a kinder expression for the African American, although it too was universally despised in the black community.

Two months before Justice Sayre sat in his office writing the Court's opinion describing Mary Miniard's train trip up North, Zelda Sayre had left her home traveling alone by rail from Montgomery to New York against her father's sternly expressed wishes. She was on her way to marry a young, extravagant writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The case concluded in 1923, six years after Roy's father shot himself, and, within six more years, in a very similar setting Roy Percy would shoot himself... Roy was survived by a wife and three children, including his oldest son Walker, who were moved to the Mississippi Delta. After discovering the goodness of time, the second Walker Percy spent his own life pondering and writing evocatively of race, death, and privilege in the South...