US President Warren G. Harding comes to Birmingham to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Birmingham, a city now deeply wounded by its recent internal struggles over race, class, and religion. Maintaining a very rewarding law practice, Hugo Black challenges the state convict lease system and its slavery-like practices as the city's Protestant white residents become enthralled by the marketing-savvy appeals of the Ku Klux Klan. As he navigates his own convictions, obligations, and ambitions amid the City's cauldron of concerns and conflicts, Black joins the Klan. A few weeks later, he appears in court on behalf of Alabama's poor African Americans whose labor and lives are being sacrificed in the name of industrial profits and good government.

A reserved, distinguished-looking man, [President] Warren G. Harding ...was welcomed with exuberant Southern hospitality... More than one hundred thousand people crowded the streets as endless lines of floats and soldiers passed the dignitaries' balcony at the Tutwiler Hotel...

According to the Negro press, Harding's speech was the first time "any President of the United States has devoted a formal address" to race relations... The President spoke more for the ambitions of Republicans and Northern capitalists than from any moral imperative for racial progress.

From Atlanta's Imperial Palace, Kluxer chief William Simmons published an open letter in the Birmingham newspaper condemning nationwide attempts "to lynch the Ku Klux Klan...

In all likelihood, the President was trying to play everyone's political tune. As the White House let rumors of Harding's Klan affiliation ooze about the nation, U.S. Attorney General Harry Daugherty, Harding's former campaign manager, launched a Klan investigation in cooperation with Congressional Republicans in Northern districts where immigrant populations voted in large numbers.

John Brown and many other convicts leased to Alabama coal operators were Hugo Black's clients. Brown had been convicted of robbery in 1909. He had lived largely underground as a convict miner for more than ten years until he was "severely burned and charred" over most of his body in a major accident at the Montevallo Mining Company's Aldrich mine, now worked exclusively by convict labor.

In arguments to the jury, Black indicted the entire mining industry which was willing for men--he need not say both black and white men--to die or be permanently disabled, unable to support their own families, because mining companies wanted to save money on timber props.

Henry Lewis's case was presented before U.S. District Judge W. I. Grubb ...Because Lewis was an illiterate pauper--able only to make his distinctive "X" as a signature on the affidavit--Judge Grubb permitted Hugo Black to summon witnesses without covering the usual court cost.

In 1881, John H. Bankhead, Sr., became Alabama's prison warden... On a state salary of $2,000, Warden Bankhead began creating a political dynasty and family fortune. One former state official investigated the convict department... "How can the Governor fail to cause proceedings to be instituted at once [against Bankhead]?" he asked. "Are we all thieves?"

In the name of government efficiency, black convicts in the lease system in late 1921 were left to "look death in the face" within the darkness of three Alabama mines.

...in early 1922, the plight of Birmingham's jobless veterans became a tragic public issue when a homeless ex-soldier died on the streets... A few days afterwards, more than ...ten thousand people joined to pay last respects ...as the bugler sounded "taps," five Klansmen in full regalia mysteriously appeared at the open grave. "The klansmen approached reverently ...," a local reporter wrote, "stood for a moment with hands outstretched over the grave, as if in pious consecration, then vanished into the crowd leaving no trace as to their identity."
The ceremony, preserved in newsreels, resembled consecration proceedings held four months earlier in Washington at the tomb for America's "unknown soldier."

In Alabama's new metropolitan areas white children were no longer under the constant, watchful influence of their parents, as they had been since the beginnings of Southern agricultural society when parents spent most of their farm day guiding their youngsters' chores and behavior with hardly any other influence outside of church and school... Poorer white children often worked as employees for mill owners--not as helpers to their fathers on the farm.

Birmingham's white citizens suddenly realized that five white men and women had been killed by Negro attackers who remained at large, and reacted frantically in fear and anger about what they were sure was the work of one black maniac, nicknamed "Henry the Hacker."

The Klan belief in white supremacy was the standard faith of the white South, including all who voted or held office under the Democratic Party's banner of "White Supremacy." In Kluxers' public acts--usually silent, always ceremonial--anyone could pour his or her own interpretation into the organization's true message.

Black possessed absolutely no doubt that he could always influence others while keeping himself free of undue influence, always maintain his individual core of fairness and independence when joining others of differing views.

...the Ku Klux Klan was not, even in eyes of its own members, just another fraternal organization... It was an organization accused of fostering violence and lawlessness across the nation, Alabama, and Birmingham. Often its representatives spewed the ugliest language of hate and exclusion, and many thought Kluxers acted in the dark of night with whips and guns to back up their vile words.

The rash of floggings and organized violence that plagued the city in 1922-23 occurred as the Klan swelled in numbers, but no one in Birmingham demonstrated that the Klan was responsible for any act of violence. Despite its modern image as the cultural synonym for lynchings and floggings, the Klan's documented history of terror was not evident or proven in Birmingham at this time.

"The Klan was, in effect, . . . revived as a force to counter the corporations,"
Black once explained in confidence... as he remembered these days in Birmingham. ... Black's sister-in-law Virginia Foster Durr recalled the Klan of 1923 as "an underground union."

Four weeks after that clear, dark night when he pledged his unfailing bond with all Klansmen, Black appeared before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans to plead for his client Henry Lewis and dozens of other black convicts who had been permanently injured in Montevallo's mine.

Claiming support from thousands, including the Temperance Union and every other women's state organization, the new Statewide Campaign Committee For the Abolishment of the Convict Contract System made a special appeal...

In researching my case," Black remembered, "I turned up a federal district court decision made by Judge Sanford from Tennessee" that agreed with Black's position. The Tennessee judge was now Justice Edward Sanford...