BOOKS: South's contradictions mirrored in a justice

Rheta Grimsley Johnson - For the Journal-Constitution
Sunday, July 17, 2005

Biography

Hugo Black of Alabama: How His Roots and Early Career Shaped the Great Champion of the Constitution. By Steve Suitts. NewSouth Books. $37.50. 640 pages.

The verdict: A beautifully told story of the complexities that factored into the segregated, struggling, reconstructed South.

Anyone thinking that Deep South politics and race relations in the past century were simple black-and-white matters should read Steve Suitts' amazing account of the childhood and early career of Alabama's Hugo Black.

Most of us realize U.S. Supreme Court Justice Black (1886-1971) didn't fall from the womb a champion of equal rights, justice and the Constitution. Even a casual student of contemporary history has heard that young lawyer Black joined the Ku Klux Klan in 1923, a membership that has intrigued legal scholars and forever hounded Black.

Author Suitts makes the case that Black's involvement with the Klan was actually an act of progressive and practical politics, nothing so cut-and-dried as racism. In 1926, it was a coalition of Klansmen, civic boosters, farmers, factory workers and teetotaling Baptists who made possible Black's narrow victory in the U.S. Senate race. But it was Black's Klan involvement that insulated the candidate from charges he'd been far too friendly to black interests and other causes of social equality.

"In 1926," Suitts writes, "no other candidate had represented a biracial labor union with Negro officers. None had clients whose black and white members committed acts of violence against white citizens. No other candidate had represented the Alabama AFL at the time when it endorsed the right of all men to vote. No other Senate candidate had attempted to remove a city's police force and public officials because they mistreated black suspects and criminals. No one else represented African Americans in court against white industrialists. None but Hugo Black had defended the constitutional rights of convicted black murderers and robbers serving life terms in Alabama's prison system. And no one else had stood --- much less volunteered --- in open court to defend organized black lawlessness, to represent black criminals who rioted, dynamited, and destroyed several thousand dollars of equipment as they illegally seized control of the white man's mine."

Suitts even argues that with the "progressive" candidate, Black, inoculated by his Klan membership, the 1926 race may be one rare Alabama election when "white voters momentarily could hear appeals to their economic self-interest" instead of only the predictable drumbeat of racial politics.

In other words, it's darn hard to label a Klan member a race-mixer.

This is a well-told story of political contortions and linguistic nuances, all the complexities that factored into the segregated, struggling, reconstructed South. Nothing was simple, or even as it seemed. The use of white women --- or their exaggerated purity --- as an excuse for segregationist laws is an example of common contradictions. In theory, white women were placed on a pedestal, exalted as too innocent for a harsh world, not to mention sure victims of unbridled black male lust.

Reality was a different story. Most Alabama white women worked "from can to can't," both in the house and fields, rearing many children and keeping their hungry families fed. "If there was a pedestal for these women, it was near the backside of a cow at milking time," Suitts observes.

The way lawyer Black used the racist complexities of the vernacular in his stunningly successful courtroom performances is tightrope-walking at its best. To say, for instance, "white lady" was redundant and implied a black female could be a lady, something all-white juries did not want to hear.

Black's almost fanatical devotion to Prohibition and its legal logistics is a surprising chapter in the story of his pre-Washington days. The son of an alcoholic, Black was a temperance zealot, practicing personally what he preached in his Sunday School room and in various courtrooms.

From careful looks at turn-of-the-century Populists, to public education, to labor union wars, this beautifully written biography is more than Hugo Black's story. It is a clear look at an unruly Alabama --- what it was, and what it became because of what it was --- and the South as a whole.

No, Hugo Black was not without blemish. His last Alabama case --- defending a white friend who shot a black man in the back --- stayed on his conscience the rest of his life. But most of his earliest legal fights, within the context of a segregated society, were almost revolutionary in their evenhandedness.

Fair-minded souls cannot read Suitts' tome without learning something new --- about lawyer Hugo Black, Alabama, the South and themselves.

Rheta Grimsley Johnson, a syndicated columnist, divides her time between Iuka, Miss., and Hammond, La.